


Once, We Watched a Lazy World Go By

by AmbitiousSkychild



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Archer Lance, BAMF Keith, Established Relationship, Happy Ending, Keith as Maid Marian, Lance as Robin Hood, Lance's love for Keith is eternal and vice versa, Love Conquers All, M/M, Mutual Pining, Pining, Power Couple, Reuniting, Robin Hood AU, Robin Hood in space, Sharpshooter Lance, THE HAPPIEST OF ENDINGS, lotor stans this one might not be for you, there's some angst tho
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-22
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2020-01-23 20:00:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 44,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18556798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AmbitiousSkychild/pseuds/AmbitiousSkychild
Summary: “I hope I win that kiss.”Keith wasn’t even looking at him when he said it, hunched over with his head resting against his hands over his knees, though after a while, he started to look particularly frozen at Lance’s words – Lance’s stupid, thoughtless words - but then Keith sighed.Annoyed, he lifted his head from off his arms, eyes still glaring frustratingly down on his knees, and he groused, in that voice – god, the one that usually meant a reckoning was coming, but if he would just look up– “Dude, the kiss is with Allura–” he drawled.Finally, he looked up and completely froze. And Lance knew he froze, too – could feel the absolutely stupid look on his face as he tried to take it all in, memorize and absorb it all – understand all the ways Keith had grown and changed.“Lance,” Keith whispered, gutted and raw like he couldn’t believe it.Lance huffed out his own watery laugh. “Hi,” he managed back.





	Once, We Watched a Lazy World Go By

**Author's Note:**

> Here's the Robin Hood/Votron cross over AU nobody asked for, but I took 5 months out of my life to deliver! Here's to Lance being the sharpshooter we deserve
> 
> [Please check out this amazing art](http://hystericalcherries.tumblr.com/tagged/ambitiousskychild) by [hystericalcherries](http://hystericalcherries.tumblr.com/) who is an amazing artist who deserves a follow!

Prologue:

On Lance’s seventeenth birthday, he was told in no short order that he was almost a man. He looked just like his father did at seventeen – his mother had shown him a picture, took one of he and his father together, side by side just to make the point. Then Lance couldn’t get the comment out of his head the rest of the day until he went to bed when it started to spiral. It was a well-intentioned comment that Lance’s brain took all of two seconds to make foreboding.

“Goodnight, Lance,” his mother whispered, flicking out his lights as she leaned in the doorway. “Happy birthday,” his father told him with a soft smile on his way out into the hall. They would stop by two more rooms to say goodnight to his other siblings as well, just like they did every night.

On the ceiling, over his bed, glowed a million tiny stars from the quadrant projector on his bedside table – brand new, only having been unwrapped hours earlier as a gift from his parents at dinner. It was an expensive gift, Lance knew – he’d spent more than enough time ogling at it in the window of the gadget store on the way to his school every day. And though half of him couldn’t stop thinking about how much he knew it cost and how they couldn’t really afford it as a family of nine and how _men_ _had to think about these things_ , he couldn’t help the warm feeling in his guts overshadowing the guilt that his parents had somehow gotten it for him anyway.

His brother, Luis, was already asleep in his small bed by the door, oblivious to the lightshow above them. Lance sighed, pulling his sheets up to his neck and tried not to feel so stranded. His eyes roved over to his window, locking on the castle far off in the distance, but he made himself focus back on the stars and constellations on his ceiling.

He’d gotten just about everything he wanted. It was a perfect birthday, he reminded himself, even as his eyes roved back over to the window. Even as he stared longingly at the castle until he fell asleep, thoughts turning over to visions of deep purple eyes and an irresistible grin bookended with two perfect dimples–

A loud _slap_ sounded above his head, startling him awake, startling him upright.

He could see Luis, still asleep in the darkness, and turned frantically over his shoulder to his window to see a tuft of dark hair outside, bouncing up and down on the other side of the glass. Keith was outside trying to jump into view. Panicking, Lance kicked at his sheets and scrambled over onto his knees, leaning up to open his window just as Keith found something sturdy to stand on, and.

And there was _Keith_ , standing innocently outside his house in the middle of the night with his big, dark eyes and his toothy grin and–

Lance tried not to look as lovestruck as he felt. “Keith, you can’t be here,” he whispered, and he _wanted_ to be stern, but there was no stopping the upward tug of his own lips as he looked at him. The wind sweeping in from the woods tousled his raven locks around his face and dropped his hair into his eyes and Lance snorted.

Keith huffed, pushing his hair back. “Well, I am,” he argued with that _look_. The one that dared Lance to act like he didn’t want this. Lance always lost that dare.

“Yeah, I _see_ that, but–”

“Come outside,” Keith said, out of his mouth like an eruption – like he just couldn’t stop it, like it was that _simple_ and he leaned up closer to the window on the tips of his toes like it wasn’t the cutest thing.

“No,” Lance told him with a frantic glance back to his brother, still asleep and clueless across the room. He could hear it like a reminder, like a warning, how silent his house was at the moment. How _wrong_ and irresponsible this was. “You should go back to the castle, Keith, you’ll get caught and I–”

“Lance,” Keith interrupted softly, and there were those big, dark _eyes_ , pulling Lance in and _in_ like an anchor, and his bow-shaped lips dropped into that pout. “Please?” he said, and Lance was a goner.

“Stand back,” Lance said thoughtlessly, and he pretended not to notice Keith’s grin of triumph as he climbed slowly and carefully out of his window in his ratty pajamas.

Keith was watching him, looking a mix of excited and nervous, like he didn’t quite know what to say or how to begin with whatever this was. Lance knew he shouldn’t, but he couldn’t stop himself stepping closer, reaching out wordlessly to tug at the olive-green fabric donning Keith’s body, nearly swallowing him as it hung loosely off the form-fitting suit the Marmoran spies wore.

And Keith blushed purple, eyes dropping to the ground as he chewed on his bottom lip. “You said I could wear it,” he reminded Lance, like he’d somehow forget. He moved to peel it off but Lance stopped him.

“I know,” he said quickly, because he hadn’t forgotten. Because it was impossible to notice anything aside from Keith wearing his jacket and how surreal it all felt. “I don’t need it back just yet,” Lance rushed out quickly, a poor excuse and they both knew it. “I can’t send the prince back sick. It’s kinda cold.”

It wasn’t.

But there was that grin, the one Keith couldn’t really control as he rolled his eyes. “Shut up,” he huffed, eyes alight with that mischief Lance so loved. “Come on, I have something to show you.” And Lance thought _there it is_ , as Keith grabbed his hand, pulling him along behind him at a run into the woods. Lance threw one last glance back at the castle before the trees completely enclosed them.

“So, where are you taking me?” Lance called out.

“You’ll see.”

It was a few more minutes of running, Lance growing more and more paranoid by the second that someone from the palace would find them, would have followed Keith all the way here when he’d snuck out. That one of Keith’s guards might be waiting for them wherever Keith was planning to take him. That this could all be over – that he’d be severely punished for daring to even _speak_ to the prince, much less–

“Here we are,” Keith breathed, slowing to a stop with a squeeze to Lance’s hand.

Habitually, Lance squeezed back. He looked around at the clearing Keith had brought them into. The light of Daibazaal’s three moons made its way through a halo in the surrounding treetops, and just beneath the circle of light was a large blanket and a woven basket. The sounds of the nature around them made it feel like they were in a pocket away from civilization or anyone or anything that could ruin this or split them apart – even Lance’s own anxieties. Just the sounds of the bugs and creatures and a trickling stream somewhere nearby.

“Shit, do you think it’s stupid?” Keith spoke up quietly after a long moment of silence had passed, absentmindedly fiddling with the purple crystal around his neck. “Do you hate it?”

Lance huffed, squeezing Keith’s hand in his again. He reached up to grab the other one. “No, I love it,” Lance told him, ducking down a bit to catch Keith’s eyes. “Did you do this for me?”

Keith heaved a full-body sigh of relief, shutting his eyes a moment as he leaned in a bit closer. When his eyes opened again, he was so close Lance couldn’t see anything outside the pool of Keith’s eyes and he didn’t want to. “It was Allura’s idea. She helped me put it all together, and I basically owe her my life now,” he admitted with an amused sigh, “but I think it was worth it. Happy birthday, Lance.”

“Oh, my _god_ ,” Lance murmured, eyes falling shut as he grinned like a loon. Keith’s arms came up to circle around his shoulders.

“Why are you always so surprised when I remember your birthday?” Keith laughed softly.

“You’ve got bigger things on your hands to worry about than–”

“You’re the world to me,” Keith interrupted, voice so absolute and stubborn that Lance forced himself to open his eyes and _face_ this. Keith stared back unblinkingly, brows furrowed over intense eyes and he _meant_ it. And this could so easily turn into a fight again, but–

In an instant of pure uninhibited _want_ , he swallowed his anxieties about it and ducked to tentatively press his lips to Keith’s. It wasn’t their first kiss, but it was the first one Lance had ever made himself brave enough to initiate.

And Keith kissed right back, arms tightening around Lance’s shoulders like he was afraid he’d disappear if he didn’t hold on, something that made Lance’s chest _pang_ with hurt. He pulled Keith against him, held him close and felt Keith smile as he did, leaning happily after him when Lance pulled away to breathe.

“We should eat,” Keith breathed out, looking dazed as he slowly retracted his arms from Lance’s shoulders, looking slightly pained to do it. Lance tried and failed to bite down on his smile as Keith ducked his head, pulled Lance over to the blanket. “It’s gonna get cold.”

Lance sat, patient and love-struck, leaned against a tree as Keith emptied the basket full of foods Lance had never tried before – more food than either of them could eat in a night, but he knew better than to say that, especially when Keith revealed, around a bashful smile, that he’d had to sneak into the kitchens before the suns rose this morning to ask the chefs to make it in private without alerting Princess Krolia.

“It’s really, really, _really_ good,” Lance gushed around a mouthful of food. He probably looked disgusting, but there was Keith smiling at him like he had anywhere near the amount of class he would need for the two of them to make sense together.

When they were alone, though, Keith always leapt at the chance to relax, eating his food with his bare hands rather than using any of the utensils still sitting inside the basket. “Oh, how was your birthday?” Keith asked like he was just remembering conversation etiquette.

Between bites, Lance told him about the small party his family had thrown him. About how his dad had gotten off work early to come home for it and they’d let Lance miss school. About how his gran had spent all morning making him a cake and his younger siblings had made him drawings at their school and how after dinner his parents had given him the quadrant projector he’d wanted all year.

“And then I got to see you,” Lance finished, eyes down on his knees as his face grew warmer and warmer and _warmer_. “I actually got everything I wanted,” he realized with a grin. That never happened.

Keith made no show of hiding his flattery, lightly kicking the basket aside as well as the empty dishes surrounding them as he scooted closer. “You wanted to see me for your birthday?”

“I want to see you all the time,” Lance admitted like he had the _right_. Like he wasn’t treading extremely thin ice just being here with Keith and letting him talk him into this again and again and again, like this wasn’t horribly inappropriate for someone of his class, much less a lowly human, to even make eye contact with Daibazaal’s prince.

But then Keith – beautiful, perfect Keith – bit his lip and held it back for all of two seconds before he turned the world upside down. “Lance, I love you,” he said between glances at the blanket. “Like, a lot. I really… I love you.”

And Lance felt like his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. Keith loved him and – and he’d never _said_ that before and – _I love you, too_ , Lance wanted to say. But the words of his mother kept him silent. He was almost a man. And when this fell through, when they were found out, Lance wouldn’t be a dumb _kid_ anymore, he’d be a _man_ , and Keith was almost a man, too, and when he was, he’d be married off to someone royal – someone who deserved him, and loving each other now was only going to hurt them later and–

“You shouldn’t say that, Keith,” he managed in a voice very unlike him. More like a citizen with the proper respect for the crown, not the Lance that went off in the night with the _prince_ putting the both of them in danger–

“Why not?” Keith asked with narrowed eyes and furrowed brows and that hard frown because he _knew_ where this was going and neither of them wanted it to go there.

“No, don’t get – don’t get mad, it’s just… you know you’ll be married off within a few years,” Lance stressed. “You’ll forget about me–”

“How am I supposed to forget _you_ , I’ve known you half my _life_ ,” Keith spat back. “And I don’t care what I’m supposed to do or who I’m supposed to _be_ later on, I want to be with _you_. I thought you’d want that too.”

“I _do_ ,” Lance promised. “I’m just – thinking about the future and you can’t just – you never seem to understand how dangerous this is.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” Keith countered. He scooted himself closer to scoop up Lance’s hand. “It’s not like I’m the first royal to ever fall in love with a civilian. I’ll be eighteen in a few months and then I’ll marry you,” he decided with a nod. “No one will be able to do anything to you, you’ll be my husband, so they can’t tear us apart,” he promised, continuing on that train with words Lance couldn’t process, couldn’t even _hear_.

It shocked Lance silent as he tried to imagine, in some alternate reality, the possibility of he and Keith ever being able to truly _be_ together. Getting to see Keith every day without having to keep it a secret, getting to kiss Keith whenever he wanted without having to battle his own anxieties and his fear of the law to do it. To simply _be_ with his best friend, the love of his life, for the rest of his life and being able to accept it as reality.

Hell, he wished he could accept Keith _loving_ him as reality.

“I’m sorry,” Keith said suddenly.

“Huh?”

“I’m sorry I said it,” Keith explained, looking hard pressed to do it, but he sounded genuinely repentant and it made Lance _ache_. “I didn’t mean to make us fight, or ruin your birthday, I just. I won’t say it again. I’m sorry.”

“Keith,” Lance murmured helpless, because Keith wasn’t supposed to apologize for saying the best thing he’d ever _said_ to Lance. The thing the deepest parts of him always longed to hear, even if he couldn’t just let himself have it. “You didn’t ruin my birthday by saying it. I just… We have to be serious about this eventually. Your dad…”

Finally, Keith seemed to understand. He was right; he wasn’t the first royal to ever fall in love with a civilian. He wasn’t even the first to fall in love with a _human_ civilian. Princess Krolia had had her own fling with a human civilian seventeen years ago, and Keith’s dad’s whereabouts were unknown to this day. Keith sighed. “That wouldn’t happen to us.”

Something about the determination and the _hurt_ in Keith’s eyes made Lance stop arguing. Made him want to stop thinking about the future for once, even if it was a little irresponsible, made him want to indulge in whatever fantasy Keith imagined for them. “I know,” he said as Keith did a double take so drastically it was almost comical.

“You know,” he echoed with an unsure smile.

“Keith, I love you, too,” Lance said, finally, _finally_ after years of it eating at his insides, sitting on the tip of his tongue, only barely held back by his teeth, and the way Keith _smiled_ at those words made Lance regret all the years he’d stayed silent. “I honestly don’t remember a time when I _didn’t_ love you. I know I’m a coward, but if nothing else I want you to know that.”

Keith was still beaming, face blushing a bit purple as he moved to lean fully against Lance’s side. “You’re not a _coward_ ,” he said back with a small chuckle. “You’re the most sensible one out of the two of us,” he admitted, dragging a chuckle out of Lance, too who dropped an arm around him. “I guess one of us needs to think about the hard future stuff.”

“It’s a curse,” Lance snorted. “I’d gladly trade you.”

“Nah, you keep it,” Keith laughed into his shoulder, pulling the blanket from beneath them and draping it over the both of them. He crowded more into Lance’s side, resting his head on his shoulder as Lance tried not to coo out loud. “Say it again,” he mumbled, low enough that Lance almost missed it, low enough that Keith could have denied saying anything if Lance asked him to repeat himself.

Lance pulled him closer. “I love you,” he said.

He felt Keith smile, wide and uncontrollable into his shoulder. “Okay,” he managed. “That’s a good place to leave it. No more future talk right now.”

Lance smiled. “Okay.” And he couldn’t stop smiling. There were a thousand things to worry about, but for the moment Keith loved him. And he didn’t want to think about anything else, didn’t want to stop talking to him and hearing his voice. “So, how was your day?”

Keith scoffed. “What, you wanna hear about boring palace life?” he joked, proceeding on to talk about Allura’s embarrassingly obvious crush on their tall, buff guard and Lotor’s ever growing disdain for the both of them. Lance never quite knew what to say when Keith talked about Lotor and how he treated Keith. It had been that way ever since Lotor’s mother, Queen Honerva died ten years ago. According to Keith, Lotor had never quite been the same, but still. He couldn’t imagine ever treating his own siblings half as badly as Lotor treated his cousins.

He didn’t feel it when he drifted off, opened his eyes to the bright morning like he’d only blinked since the last time he spoke. The sun was burning into his eyes as his brain booted up slowly.

His arm was asleep, tingling under Keith’s weight. There was drool pooling on Lance’s shoulder, but his dumb, lovestruck brain found it endearing. “Keith,” he murmured, shaking his arm a bit until he stirred, humming and burrowing further into Lance’s shoulder in such a way that Lance almost gave up.

“Lance?” he murmured, tired eyes blinking slowly up at him against his shoulder.

“ _Whoa_ ,” Lance uttered, eyes roving Keith’s face, tired and indented from Lance’s shirt and too adorable for Lance to handle. “ _This_ is what you look like when you first wake up? Are you kidding me?”

Keith purpled a bit, shutting his eyes a moment with a tired grin, leaning back against Lance’s shoulder.

Lance sighed, content. “We fell asleep,” he told him.

“We fell asleep,” Keith echoed, clearly too out of it to have understood what Lance was saying. Then he gasped, shooting upright. “ _Shit, we fell asleep!_ ” he yelled, jumping to his feet, scrambling around, trying to gather up the blanket and fold it and something about it was just so…

Lance bit down on his smile, started gathering all the food together and putting the dishes back into the basket, flicking the bugs away. He didn’t know why he wasn’t panicking, himself. Luis would rat him out in a hot second, and his parents were going to kill him, but. Maybe it was the serenity of the bright, calm morning with _Keith_ at his side, but he knew he could handle it. He couldn’t think beyond his own reach, but he felt like he could handle anything.

“Oh, shit, here,” Keith hissed, placing the basket and blankets on the ground to shrug off Lance’s jacket. “I can’t show up back home after staying out all night with this,” he explained, looking sheepish and reluctant to have to do it. He held it out, eyes on the ground. “You should take it back.”

Lance blinked, eyes jumping from Keith’s unenthusiastic face, down to his jacket and then back. “Oh,” he settled on. He reached out a hesitant hand to take it back, to fold it over his own arm. Somehow he felt like putting it on so soon would ruin it.

“But here,” Keith said quickly, brows furrowed over determined eyes as his hands slipped up to the back of his neck, undoing the cord to his crystal necklace with his tongue between his lips. “You can take this. You won’t get in trouble for having it, right?”

“Well,” Lance coughed a laugh, confused and sardonic. “ _No_. But…”

He knew the story behind this necklace – the crystal hanging from the center and how Keith’s mother, Princess Krolia had earned it. How she’d followed in her own mother’s footsteps and had taken up the burden of the trials of Marmora when she was no older than Keith was now. How she’d earned her blade and her Marmoran title alongside the princess one. How she’d crystalized a bit of luxite that made Marmoran weapons into this pendant and kept it with her as a source of strength. How Keith wanted to be just like her.

When Keith was a kid, overwhelmed by the thought that being half human meant that he was _all_ bad, Princess Krolia had passed her necklace onto him. He could remember Keith showing it to him and telling him all about it like it was yesterday.

“Good. So, you can hold onto something from me this time,” Keith decided, stepping forward. He reached up to knot it around Lance’s neck with soft fingers, and gentle movements, and so much care, Lance almost couldn’t breathe.

“Okay,” Lance decided, even if he shouldn’t – even if he wanted to argue that he’d ruin it somehow. He knew Keith wouldn’t listen. Keith had always had too much faith in him. “I’ll keep it safe,” he promised, but Keith was already back to scrambling around in a frenzy.

“I don’t even know how late it is,” Keith was saying, taking the basket from Lance’s outstretched hand, folding the blanket over his arm. “My mom’s going to _kill_ me, I probably missed breakfast–” Keith stopped mid-sentence, looking Lance over like he was something he’d never seen before. “Why aren’t you losing your shit? You should be losing your shit.”

“Don’t know,” Lance shrugged, feeling his stupid grin, but he didn’t care enough to hide it. “We fell asleep together – it was nice. I had a really good birthday.”

Keith froze in his fidgeting, a slow smile overtaking his own face, stepping up onto his toes to press his lips to Lance’s. He dropped back down with a soft smile. “I love you,” he said.

“I love you, too,” Lance said just as simply, just as happily.

“Okay then,” Keith grinned back, relieved. “I’ll see you soon,” he promised, and Lance forced down the dread he felt at those words. Keith picked up his things again, turned on his heel toward the castle.

He watched Keith break into a run for the castle before finally turning toward his own house. He felt the crystal bouncing against his chest as he walked like it would burn through his skin.

Someday, he’d have to give this all up. He’d have to see Keith marry someone else and pretend they never knew each other. Maybe Keith had the right idea. Maybe it really was best to just not think about it.

*

When Lance was a kid, too scared to go to sleep at night without a bedtime story and a big, stuffed, soft _something_ in his arms, his parents and grandparents would ease him and his siblings with fantastical stories of how, long ago, people like them used to live on a planet called Earth.

Earth at first, had sounded something like a dream with its bright blue skies and cotton candy clouds and endless, endless _water_ – more water than _land_ , and different animals than Lance could _imagine_. And the stories stayed that way, whimsical and dreamlike until Lance and his siblings were deemed old enough to learn the rest. To learn about people. Humans. _Them_.

To learn that despite its utter beauty, Earth had been destroyed because of the people inhabiting it. Earth had had more people than most resources, the other resources were destroying the planet, and of all the ways to handle it, the humans had chosen the worst ones. Eventually, due to pure negligence, they slowly killed their own planet. Ultimately, they had to evacuate it to survive, killing some of their own in their desperation to save themselves, attacking as individuals when they should have been a unit.

The humans of a millennia ago had been a great embarrassment, a _folly_ , a cautionary tale to other races, but unable to discover a new planet to be both untouched by any other species and also inhabitable, they were forced to settle into already assimilated planets, ashamed and broken, but able to survive.

Some of the humans made lives for themselves on planet Olkarion, adapting quickly to the nature and technology there. Many others found themselves on the Balmera – a planet that Lance had learned in school was actually _alive_. He was taught that that was the best place for a human – a planet too sentient and intelligent to be destroyed by human incompetence.

Of course, there were many other planets, other galaxies and quadrants and who knew how far all of humanity had managed to spread, but in the case of most humans, home became planet Daibazaal, renown all across the galaxy as a powerhouse – as a merging of two of the oldest, and most resilient races come together to create and champion the greatest technological advances in just about all the universe – Voltron, the universe’s greatest defender, being one of them.

Daibazaal had become, over time, both Galran and Altean.

Planet Altea still functioned on its own for those who believed in keeping tradition, but most Alteans were found on Daibazaal, perfectly native to it for millennia – so intertwined that their cultures were nearly one. Together they made Daibazaal known for its ingenuity, for always pushing forward. No concept was too big or outrageous to take on, even the concept of granting refuge on their powerhouse planet to humans, despite their track record. Humans who would go on to occupy Daibazaal for centuries to come. Humans who would go on to grow and set roots and leave their own histories, create their own interwoven cultures as if they’d never lived anywhere else. Almost as if being human didn’t even matter anymore.

Almost.

_Almost_ , because. Well, in the long, long, _long_ line of royal lineage Lance had had to learn throughout all his schooling, there had never been a human that history liked to talk about. And Lance had never met an extremely wealthy human – not in the way it was impossible to miss wealthy Galrans or Alteans. He’d never met, or even heard about a human who managed to make it out of Sector Five, while only the poorest of the other races managed to make it _in_.

And Lance, who had never even _seen_ Earth but from textbook pictures, wouldn’t know he technically wasn’t natural to Daibazaal if he hadn’t been taught – wouldn’t have the context needed to understand the sudden fearful murmurs about Daibazaal dying like Earth if he, as a human, hadn’t been made to feel like he should take responsibility for it again and again.

At 24 though, Lance was past feeling responsible or guilty for anything happening on Daibazaal. It was getting worse and worse every day since Voltron left seven years ago, but Lance would be the first to admit that it was a huge relief that there wasn’t a human to be blamed for a single thing of it. Rather, it was one Galran prince tyrant who had been slowly on his way to killing or imprisoning anyone who wasn’t Galra for the last seven years.

That was, whenever he wasn’t being thwarted by the Blue Bandit, anyway.

There were rumors that the only person Prince Lotor was truly ever afraid of was the Blue Bandit – a hooded vandal with a bow and arrow who went around making Prince Lotor look like an absolute fool. A valorous marksman with a vengeance and infallible aim. A peasant-turned-vigilante who never missed a shot unless he wanted to teach a lesson.

There was a lot of hope and belief that one day, the Blue Bandit would save them all. Some day. Lance tried to have hope, too, but until that day, things were worrying. A steady tumbling slope of things going from astoundingly horrifying to absolutely abysmal and–

No, Daibazaal wasn’t quite dying like Earth, but Lance felt justified in saying that it felt pretty damn close.

As it was, the walk from the heart of the woods into town on nights like these sort of made Lance want to die like Earth too, but he knew better than to say that out loud. Hunk never thought it was as funny as Lance wanted him to.

Hunk in fact, seemed to be in his own headspace, stepping lightly beside him, their footfalls together creating enough commotion in the tall, dry grass to dislodge the swarms of light bugs hiding within. They floated about in their own blue glow, filling up the clearing like a gas as Lance swatted them out of the way.

“Hey,” Hunk chided, catching Lance’s wrist mid-swat. “They’re good luck, dude.”

“Nothing lucky should ever be this _annoying_ ,” Lance said back, though he didn’t mean it even a little bit. They were admittedly one of the nicer things about having to live in the woods. He was just hungry and they both knew it.

“This is your crankiest self speaking,” Hunk said back in that smug, knowing _tone_. He watched Lance from his peripheral vision as he trudged on ahead. “We’ll get some food in you and you’ll stop taking your hunger out on the nature.”

“You don’t know what I’ll stop doing,” Lance mumbled just to be annoying, and Hunk shushed him for it, waving for Lance to fall into line behind him as they stepped off the thick grass on the outskirts of the woods and onto the dirt road of Sector Five.

Lance didn’t get to spend much time in it anymore, didn’t even used to care for it all that much when he and his family lived there, right on the outskirts. But ever since he’d had to leave it, he’d come to love it. Strangely enough, he’d come to _miss_ it. It was the poorest town on Daibazaal – mostly inhabited by humans and anyone else too far beneath Galra or Altean, but it was always full of noise and people. It was rough to live there, but because of that, it was close-knit. Neighbors took it upon themselves to take care of each other. He didn’t get to visit town much these days, but a small part of him always felt something territorial – something _protective_ – on the rare occasions he did.

“Okay, so there might be soldiers here,” Hunk piped up, holding Lance back by the shoulder at the tree line. It was dark and quiet in Sector Five. Just as unsettling as it usually was. Just as eerie as it had been the night Lance left it forever. “Maybe we come back later and–”

“ _No_ , I’m fucking hungry,” Lance glared. As Hunk, rolled his eyes, he smirked, tapping obnoxiously at the bow slung over his shoulder and the arrows at his back. He stepped into the town. “What do you think I have these for, anyway?”

“I don’t know, justice?” Hunk drawled back, falling into line beside him.

“That too– you know what? Shut up and let me find some food.”

Along with the garbage and filth that littered the streets, it was difficult not to take notice of the signs scattered about the town – wanted posters boasting reward amounts almost too extravagant to grasp. Then there were the drones, flying aimlessly overhead, higher up than the trees were tall, circling over the town.

Hunk navigated them through the blind spots, taking shortcuts between small homes and under broken streetlights, Lance’s stomach growling traitorously all the while. They crept through town, Lance’s bow at the ready, arm bent back over his shoulder, ready to grab an arrow. There didn’t appear to be any other signs of life aside from the two of them – there weren’t even many homes with lights on, considering how early it was in the night. Lance began to worry, selfishly, over the likelihood of finding a food vendor.

No sooner had he thought that, did he finally see one, just up ahead in the center of the town square, and he broke into a relieved grin. Lance couldn’t read the sign from this distance, but it didn’t matter. He dashed ahead down the street, forcing Hunk to stumble after him full speed toward the first meal he’d had all day, and his stomach growled the loudest it had yet, cheering him on. “Hey, man,” Lance called out before the vendor could flip his sign. The man scanned Lance over as he approached like he might have recognized him. Lance pulled up his hood. “We promise we’ll be super quick, but do you have any–?”

A loud _bang_ interrupted him, sudden and loud, followed by desperate shouting.

_“Hey! You can’t just take those – we need them! Please!”_

And Lance froze, feeling Hunk stop beside him as they registered the very real urgency and fear in those words, in the _tone_.

“That sounds like trouble,” Hunk spoke up and Lance _knew_ that, okay, he knew it and goddammit, his growling stomach knew it, too.

Lance whimpered, willing the vendor to see his puppy eyes, risking it all. “Can you stay open for like twenty more minutes?” he begged.

The vendor shook his head, though he managed to look sympathetic as he did. “Sorry, gentlemen,” he said, looking frantically toward the sound of the commotion. Reaching frantically down to grab a bag from behind his wooden dilapidated food stand, he slung it over his back and sped off back toward the slums without a look back.

“God _dammit_ ,” Lance swore, turning toward the commotion with a frustrated kick at the ground. The shouting grew more distressed and desperate and Lance was becoming certain his regular-civilian persona was done for the night. With one last sigh of surrender up toward the drones, he activated his mask.

“Sorry about dinner,” Hunk remarked, mask already activated as they broke into a run.

“It’s fine,” Lance huffed back, stomach gargling in defiance that it absolutely was _not_.

They followed the commotion deeper into the city, until they stumbled across a group of children cowering behind one angry Balmeran woman as she faced off with a Galra soldier in a one-sided screaming match.

Lance recognized her as the orphanage director. It used to be run by an older woman, but Lance started to see this woman around the time of his late teens. She couldn’t have been much older than he was, and she’d always looked so gentle. Calming. The perfect fit for an orphanage.

She was a raging yalex spider now, fearlessly screaming a tirade at the retreating back of the imposing Galra soldier loading quintessence crystals into a tiny shuttle as if he couldn’t hear her. He’d left the orphanage pitch-black inside and surely cold. The children were huddled behind the orphanage director in thin blankets, watching helplessly on as the Galra soldier took their power sources.

Somewhere between the soldier shutting the door to the shuttle and the orphanage director rearing back in shock at what she must have just realized was really _happening_ , a chain reaction started, beginning with an affronted, “ _Hey!_ ”

One of the children, a tall, gangly, sandy-haired teen, stepped determinedly out from behind her guardian with fists clenched tightly at her side. She had closed more than half the distance between herself and the guard before anyone could stop her – a walking ragdoll compared to what she was trying to face. He still had his back to her, but she didn’t care. “Didn’t you hear her? She _said–!_ ”

Lance burst into action, legs carrying him full speed for The Girl with the Apparent Death Wish. “Whoa there, slow down, feisty,” he said, bow and arrow at the ready as he planted himself before her.

The soldier, finished situating his stolen crystals, snapped back to attention. Glowing eyes widened at the sudden change of development, searching until they landed in a glare on Lance’s mask. Lance glared right back.

“Did Prince Lotor order this?” Lance growled, arrow aimed to strike right in between yellow eyes.

The guard looked Lance up and down, eyes jumping back and forth between him and Hunk who had positioned himself at Lance’s side to shield the girl completely from view. The guard seemed to be stuck surveying their suits, then Lance’s jacket. Yellow eyes roved threateningly back up to meet angry blue. “Who wants to know?” His face set into a glare. “Traitors?”

Lance smirked, drawing back his arrow. “Something like that.” He released his arrow as the orphanage director started shouting frantically from behind him for the children to go back inside.

Lance readied another arrow as the soldier barrel rolled out of the way of the first. He wouldn’t miss again, aiming this time for a leg.

“Who are you?” the soldier demanded again, this time more harshly, breath falling out in pants. “You might as well show yourselves – the drones have seen everything,” he said with a point skyward where a small group had gathered.

Lance’s arrow flew free, hitting its target, sending the intended jolt of electricity through the soldier’s body as he screamed in pain, slumped into a crouch. Hunk acted quickly, charging forward and swinging his gauntlet-covered fist forward in a punch that connected so hard into the soldier’s jaw that he fell instantly limp, lying motionless in the ground.

“Oh,” Lance uttered, shaking his head at the abrupt eradication of their supposed threat. He lowered his bow and arrow, blinking slowly because he felt like he’d missed something, even though he knew he hadn’t. He walked to Hunk, who was already trying to get a grip on the soldier’s limp body. “Well, that was anticlimactic,” Lance huffed, nudging at the solder’s body with his foot.

“You could thank me,” Hunk said.

Lance rolled his eyes, a smile creeping through. “ _You could thank me_.”

Hunk sighed, but Lance knew somehow that he was smiling behind his mask. “Great. Come on, let’s get this wrapped up quick before he wakes up.”

Lance readied his bow and arrows, aiming up at the drones and shooting them down one by one, each landing on the ground and shorting out as the arrows forced their electric current through them. Hunk emptied the soldier’s shuttle of stolen crystals, settling them carefully onto the ground.

Together, they lifted the burley soldier and crammed him into the now empty shuttle, checking the configurations on its built-in map, set it to launch, and shut the glass pane. It lifted off, speeding toward the castle with its own unconscious soldier to the crown inside – a message. A symbol.

Lance rolled his eyes. “ _Who are you?_ he says,” he scoffed, bending to carefully retrieve the crystals off the ground. “They _have_ to know who we are by now, right? They should have covered that in Galra soldier orientation, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, you’d think,” he agreed with a scoff, grabbing at the remaining crystals Lance couldn’t carry. “Whatever’s been keeping Lotor out of the public eye these last couple of months – it obviously hasn’t been educating his guards,” he joked, when a loud gasp sounded from behind them.

They turned to see one of the orphans – the one with the death wish – leaning out the front door of the orphanage, staring at them with wide, shocked eyes. “Um, hey, excuse me, _oh my god?_ Did you just knock that soldier out with one punch?!”

Surprised, Hunk stammered, always easily flustered by attention. He powered down his gauntlets, clasping his hands together behind his back. “Ah yeah. Gauntlets. It’s not a big deal.”

“It’s totally a big deal,” Lance chimed in knowingly. “He does it all the time.”

“Pidge, get back–!”

Lance and Hunk froze as the orphanage director stopped mid-sentence, hand soft but firm on the teen’s shoulder as she came to join her in the doorway. She surveyed the scene before her – the Galra soldier nowhere to be found along with the two masked men who had saved her orphanage, seemingly returning her crystals to her – and let her shoulders relax.

“Wow,” she said softly, glancing back and forth between Hunk and Lance with a smile that seemed to grow more and more grateful. “Thank you so much for helping us! And for getting our crystals back,” she said, voice soft and sweet now that the threat was gone, and her charges were safe. “How can we repay you?”

“No, don’t – you don’t have to worry about us,” Hunk stammered out quickly before Lance could get a word in, voice wobbly and nervous. “You’ve got all these kids to take care of, don’t worry about a–”

In unison, both their stomachs growled so loudly the teen girl jumped. She shared a knowing look with her guardian.

“Well, if you felt like reconsidering,” the woman started with a nod and a knowing smile. “We’ve got plenty of food inside. And now that you’ve gotten our crystals back for us, I can even heat it up for you.”

 

They decided, as they watched the orphanage director set all their crystals back in their proper places, that it was probably okay to be without their masks. They deactivated them as light filled the room and the heat soon after. It wasn’t long before the children stopped shivering, but Lance felt like their eyes never strayed from his face for very long. When dinner was served, Lance found himself a bit nervous to look up from his food for fear of locking gazes with ten kids already staring at him.

The orphanage owner went by the name Shay. She was just a bit younger than Lance, it turned out, and not originally from here. She came from the Balmera with her family. Specifically, her brother and grandmother who used to run the orphanage with her until her brother was detained – like many, many others during the first riot after Prince Lotor's takeover – and her grandmother’s passing three months ago.

Lance spared a side glance over to Hunk on his left whose parents were both detained just the same. He was sure, with a quick look to all the children surrounding them at the small table in the den, that everyone here had more or less the same story.

“That must be really hard,” Hunk spoke up, tone reverent in a way Lance almost never heard from him. He shot Hunk a look, but he didn’t notice, eyes zeroed straight ahead, across the table at a slightly embarrassed looking Shay and–

Lance smiled, shaking his head to himself as he swallowed another gulp of food goo. Now he got it.

“What do you mean?” Shay asked, fingers reaching up to fiddle with one of the hoops hanging from her ears.

Hunk faltered, face going a bit red around the edges. “Not you can’t do it,” he rushed out. “It just must be a lot – taking care of all these kids all alone and having to worry about your brother, too... I don’t think I could do it.”

“Oh,” Shay said quickly, fingers tapping against the table. “That’s sweet, but it’s really not any trouble. You guys are all great, right?” she said with a wide smile around at each of the kids at the table. “I probably couldn’t do it without Pidge, though,” she admitted with a glance toward the scrappy teen from earlier.

“It’s not that big a deal,” said teen rolled her eyes, as if they’d been over this time and time again. “There are fourteen of us and one of you. The least I can do is help you get all these brats to bed on time.”

Lance bit down on his own smile, forcing aside the bittersweet that came with being reminded of his own sisters.

“Speaking of bed–” Shay started, laughing softly as she was interrupted immediately by a chorus of whines. “It’s late! You know the rules,” she insisted.

“But we _can’t_ go to bed yet!” One of the girls protested, and she turned knowing eyes right on him, a stare just as intrusive and curious as the stares from earlier as she pulled the rug right from underneath him, outed like it was nothing in a roomful of _children_ for fuck’s sake, said: “That’s the Blue Bandit! He didn’t even tell us what he did with that guard!”

“ _Shit_ ,” Lance swore. He heard Hunk’s spoon clatter loudly against the wooden table.

Pidge snorted, slapping a hand over her mouth as Shay stammered out an apology and tried to quiet the room, which only made the problem worse. The kids grew louder, shouting over each other as Lance had the thought that perhaps they shouldn’t have deactivated their masks, after all.

“Did you _kill_ that Galra soldier?!” The girl pressed, over Shay’s shushing.

“ _No,_ ” Hunk stressed. “We didn’t kill anyone, we just sent him back to the castle!”

“They totally killed him,” hissed one kid loudly to another, “they just don’t want to tell us that because we’re kids.”

Lance sputtered. “We _didn’t–!_ ”

“Is it true,” started another kid, voice loud and commanding as he stood in his seat, “that you’ve never, ever missed a shot with your bow and arrow?”

Hunk scoffed. “Believe me, he’s missed thousands of shots.”

_“Hey!”_

“Is it true that you fought Prince Lotor one-on-one and made him look like an idiot?” Asked another kid, even louder, forcing Lance into a laugh.

“It wasn’t _that_ cool,” Lance managed, to be humble really, since in his opinion, Lotor always looked like an idiot. “Almost got caught when all his guards showed up, but I like to think I could have won if it had been a fair fight and I hadn’t had to run for my life.”

A low chorus of _wows_ resounded around the room.

“Did you really build your own gauntlets?” Another child asked Hunk once the room had recovered.

Before he could answer, another was speaking up. “Is it true you two have built an entire _network_ through the woods that only you know how to get through?”

“Did you really fight off a raging Swathian Meerakeet _by yourselves?!_ ”

“Did you really grow up in Sector Five just like us?”

“Is it true that you and Prince Keith were sweethearts?” Pidge asked.

And Lance felt his heart _shatter_.

Hanging loose against his chest was the fragmented end of a luxite crystal, wrapped and tied into the center of a cord rope and fashioned into a necklace. Too valuable for a dirty human like him to have, he’d always thought so. Still, he’d never taken it off, not even once in the last seven years.

“Yes,” Lance answered, heart heavy as it _pounded_. He looked from smiling, waiting face to smiling, waiting face. He looked to Hunk, who was watching him back like he’d force a subject change if Lance really wanted. He looked up to Shay, standing just behind Pidge and looking apologetic, and came to a decision.

“Okay, I’ll make you guys a deal,” Lance propositioned. “I’ll tell you guys all about Prince Keith and how he came to fall, like, _embarrassingly_ in love with me,” he started, cut off by loud cheers of excitement, sending him into his own lapse of light laughter. “ _But_ ,” he raised his voice, “when I’m done, you guys have to go to bed for Miss Shay.”

The kids settled in closer, gathering so tightly around the table they were sitting atop one another, some of them nearly sitting on Lance and Hunk. Pidge excitedly went to grab another bowl of food goo as Lance tried to figure out where to even start.

He never had any trouble remembering the first time he saw Keith. He thought about it enough that he was certain when he was old and grey and his memories were frail strings unconnected to anything, he’d remember the day he met Keith.

He remembered being eight years old, meeting some snobby-looking kid who didn’t look like anyone Lance had ever played with before in the street. He had pointy ears like someone Altean, or Galran, but he wasn’t purple, and he didn’t have any marks under his eyes, but _wow_ his eyes. Lance had never seen eyes like that, just _purple_ like that, like the sky above them when it was night. Dark hair hung over his forehead and into his face and he asked to play with Lance and his ball like someone who looked like that had any business in Sector Five–

“Okay, so he was pretty,” one of the kids – a young Arusian girl – interrupted, causing Hunk to snort. Lance shoved him. “So, what happened _next?_ ”

“ _Leila!_ ” Shay chastised.

“It’s okay,” Lance said sheepishly. “I know I tend to go on about how pretty Keith is.”

“It is _constant_ ,” Hunk gagged dramatically, smiling as a room of children giggled back.

“ _Anyway_ ,” Lance stressed with a pointed look around the room. “So, it was fun and games ‘til he pulled this dirty cheater move and it made me mad, so I pushed him down in the street. And then these guards came out of nowhere and basically swarmed down on us. And they took him away.”

He remembered learning soon after that the guards were Keith’s. Then he found out _why_ Keith needed guards. It was all effectively traumatizing to an eight-year-old, and he knew full well it had played an active role in why he was so terrified of what could happen to Keith or himself every day since.

“Didn’t find out til later that he was the prince. That made everything kind of worse,” Lance continued with a sigh. He felt his leg jiggling incessantly under the table but couldn’t seem to stop it. “I thought I’d never see him again. But then a few days later, he was back, and he wanted to play ball again. He introduced me to all his guards,” Lance revealed, as if he were divulging a little secret.

“You _met_ them?” One kid echoed, looking awed. “How many were there? How big were they?”

“There were like _eight_ of them.”

“He had that many guards?!”

“Well, yeah, he was a prince,” Lance laughed. “He was watched all the time. He could never go _anywhere_ alone – he always had an entourage.”

“Okay, but if Prince Keith was watched all the time, and had a million guards, how did you guys ever see each other?” Another kid asked.

“It wasn’t that hard,” Lance answered. “We had to sneak out a lot and meet in secret. Sometimes we had to go really long stretches of time without seeing each other, but it was worth it.”

“Also, they weren’t as good at it as he wants you to think,” Hunk chimed in with that smug face. “Everyone knew Prince Keith was dating some peasant from Sector Five.”

Lance glared. “ _Dude_.”

“But why couldn’t you just tell everyone that he was dating the Blue Bandit?” Another kid demanded. “You’re a hero! They’d totally let a prince date you.”

Lance hummed, heard Hunk do the same beside him as he tried to answer. “Well, I wasn’t always the Blue Bandit, you know. I used to just be a guy.” Lance said, and it seemed to be the most shocking thing the kids had heard all night. Pidge spoke up again.

“So, how did you fall in love?” she asked so genuinely it made Lance pause.

He could admit, he’d probably never truly understand how Keith managed to fall in love with him, but in his opinion, to _know_ Keith was to love him. He tried to remember the feeling of falling – truly falling in love, but when it came to Keith, he was sure he’d always been there. That was how they fell in love.

“I guess I don’t really have an answer for that,” Lance admitted sheepishly. But something like understanding crossed over Pidge’s face as she looked at him. Maybe she’d heard all she needed to know, anyway.

“Were you going to marry him?”

“I wanted to,” Lance answered thoughtfully. “He really wanted to. But we couldn’t.”

“Why not?” Asked another child, possibly the youngest, judging by the looks of her. Lance sighed.

Looking around at each of the young faces staring back at him, Lance had no way to know just how much any of them understood about royalty and status and class expectations. There wasn’t a single one who looked younger than about seven years old, but that meant that the youngest would have only been born right when everything was going downhill. And the oldest was Pidge, who couldn’t be any older than fifteen – was probably too young to even understand what she’d spent the first half of her life living through.

But he could tell that they all knew what it meant to be human. Even if most of them weren’t human themselves, they knew what it meant, at least societally. It must have been impossible to fathom a human ever being a royal. Then to learn that even a royal status couldn’t defend a human from being treated as some kind of… sub-sentient _thing_ … He didn’t know how to explain that.

“He’s human,” Pidge answered for him, voice rough and fed up. She was human, too. It was personal for her. “It was already bad enough for a prince to be half human. He can’t marry a human,” she said, and she sounded disappointed.

“Yeah. Exactly,” Lance said, and he sounded just the same.

“Okay,” started Shay to everyone’s surprise. She looked a strange mix of impatient and impassioned as she tried to get it all _straight_. “So, he’s half human, and you’re human, and you can’t be together, but you can’t be apart – so, what did you _do?_ ”

Lance had done the only thing he could _do_. He couldn’t do anything but bide his time with Keith until it inevitably ran out. He’d tried his hardest to live in the moment but couldn’t help being constantly terrified of one day being torn apart. But Keith… Perfect, amazing, wonderful Keith had managed to combat the knowledge that his kingdom didn’t think he had the right to exist by simply one day deciding not to care.

“Keith decided to live his best life,” Lance answered carefully, thoughtfully. He saw Hunk smile encouragingly beside him from his peripheral vision, couldn’t help but take comfort in it. “And I decided to stop being a bummer. He decided that he was just as good as anyone else no matter what anyone said. He decided he liked me and no one else got to have an opinion on it.”

Sometimes, Lance thought that that was what had ruined them. That he loved Keith and that Keith had loved him back. That Keith listened to his own heart more than he listened to anyone else – not his family, or the rules of the kingdom. Not even Lance, sometimes. That Keith genuinely believed the two of them could be happy together if he just wanted it enough.

“What do you think happened to him?” Leila asked softly, and it didn’t surprise him. He’d have been more surprised if the children living in destitution in an orphanage in Sector Five somehow _didn’t_ know about the devastation that befell Daibazaal after the unsolved disappearances of Princess Allura and Prince Keith.

“I don’t know,” Lance admitted, opening a wound he had long since started trying to close. “But I do think that getting answers out of Lotor will be step one.”

“When you beat Lotor, are you gonna save our families, too?” Another child asked.

Lance looked around at each of them and felt the weight of expectation almost as heavy as his own. He hadn’t been enough to save his own family when he’d had the chance. He’d worked as hard as he could to become someone who could help people. “Well, I want to save everyone.”

“Okay kids,” Shay intervened. “Time for bed.”

After the long day they’d had, Hunk and Lance decided that it was probably close to bedtime for themselves as well. They stepped out into the night, but one look back at Pidge in the doorway made Lance pause, then make two really stupid decisions.

 

“So. You okay?”

Lance hesitated. “Yeah,” he said, ambling a bit behind. “You’ll make me another bow and arrow, right?” He glanced over to catch a painfully sympathetic-looking Hunk.

“Stop looking like that, you know I will,” Hunk said back with an eye roll. “I’m not mad at you if that’s what you’re thinking. I think you were a little reckless maybe. Just handing it over like that and all, but I think it was really sensible to leave Shay and Pidge with something to defend themselves. And, I mean, you know I’ve been wanting to upgrade your old ones for years now, so I'd call it a win-win.”

Lance hummed.

“Can’t replace your jacket though,” Hunk continued with a wince, and.

Yeah, that one was harder to reassure himself about, but he hadn’t even thought to stop himself. He took one look at Pidge, scrawny and shivering in the doorway of the orphanage and handed it right over – one of the last physical things he had left over from his family. The hand-me-down from his older brother that he’d taken years to fully grow into, that represented everything he’d wanted so badly to grow up to _be_.

“It’s okay,” Lance said finally, because it _was_. “It was in my family forever. Nobody ever just kept it.” It went without saying that it wasn’t like there was anyone left in his family for him to give it to when he outgrew it. When he’d finally gotten it, he only ever wanted to give it to Keith anyway, who couldn’t just have it, so they’d shared it. “When we get her her family back, I’ll get my jacket back,” he decided.

“Okay, good plan. That was really cool of you back there by the way,” Hunk said, and Lance knew what was coming, because Hunk was his best friend in the whole world so Lance could never be as vague as he wanted to be. “I know all that Keith stuff is hard for you to talk about.” Underneath was a more subtle inquiry as to whether or not Lance was really, truly, honestly okay and.

And well, the answer to that was usually _no_ , not that he could say that in front of a room full of sweet, innocent kids who just wanted to know the fun stuff. The heroism and the birth of the legend and the forbidden romance of it all. And all that was fine, it was what Lance usually chose to focus on when it all got to be too much, but he couldn’t help thinking about the rest of it eventually.

One moment, Keith had promised him forever, and he had done his best to promise it back, and the next, Prince Keith and Princess Allura had been publicly missing for weeks.

The next, Daibazaal’s borders were closed, and their alliances severed from the inside. An ordered massacre on the civilians when there came to be too many questions and Lance's family among the body count.

Civilians detained.

Keith still gone.

Becoming the Blue Bandit because regular Lance was too _scared_.

“ _Yes_ , Hunk,” Lance stressed, with a tired smile. “I’m okay,” he promised, because he had to be.

Back at camp, Hunk fell asleep almost as soon as he hit his hammock, snoring soft and peaceful – a gentle rumble that had become familiar and calming over the years.

Unable to sleep himself, Lance sat high up in the tallest tree in their camp, up on the top branch, surrounded by its pink leaves, feeling the breeze tousle his hair this way and that as he stared out at the castle in the distance.

Daibazaal didn’t quite die like Earth, but Lance thought it felt pretty damn close.

And as he watched the drones and the guards circle the palace walls – as he stared and wondered exactly where inside Lotor was and what terrible thing he was going to do next, Lance thought that as a human with no home and nothing else to lose, it was going to be ten kinds of righteous justice to be the one to take Lotor down.

He sat that way, feet swinging in opposite rhythms off his branch as he lost himself in his thoughts when he saw something streak across the sky. And he blinked, rubbed at his eyes, sure he must have been imagining it, because it had looked like a _ship_ and he hadn’t seen a ship over Daibazaal in seven _years_. But _there_ , just beyond Daibazaal’s third moon was definitely a _ship_ , entering the planet’s atmosphere.

He squinted, straightening up a bit on his branch into a crouch for a better view, eyes on the sky, eyes on the ship as it closed in on the palace. It wasn’t a very large ship – more like a shuttle. It maneuvered quickly and gracefully, slowing down in an instant to descend inside the palace walls.

In the last ticks before it vanished inside the castle walls completely, Lance managed to catch the ship’s markings. He’d almost missed them, for how closely they resembled something made on Daibazaal, but he was certain now that they were just different enough to only mean one crazy thing.

It was Altean.

*

All the way back to Daibazaal, Allura worried.

She paced up and down the back of their small shuttle even though they barely had the space with Kosmo trying to sleep in the floor. Even though it technically wasn’t safe and Shiro kept panicking she’d get hurt as he maneuvered the ship through space rock. She shot him a glare that Shiro only returned even harder and Keith sunk further into his seat.

Finally surrendering, she stood fidgeting behind Keith's seat as he tried to imagine what would happen when they landed. He dreaded to think how much Daibazaal must have _changed_ in their absence, with Lotor in charge all this time. It was something he’d toiled with constantly in his head since the day he'd _left_ Daibazaal.

He tugged at his braid, pretending not to notice Shiro watching him from the corner of his eye. No one else spoke until they landed inside the walls.

Of course, in the end, Allura had been right to worry.

Almost immediately after landing, Galran soldiers surrounded their ship, seized them and brought them forcefully through the castle into what used to be Zarkon's chambers where Lotor sat waiting.

Lotor, after seven long years didn’t appear to have aged too terribly much at first glance – long, silver hair just as long and thick as always, a sign of status as it hung over his shoulder, brushing the work on his father's desktop, even if it didn’t look quite as healthy as Keith remembered. And his skin was tighter, pulled taut over his bones like stress had stretched it, and it wasn’t quite the right purple. But his eyes were what had really changed – deeply uninterested yellow orbs of judgment now sharpened and molded into a regal stare of poise and power. Complete control. A show of disdain.

And _Acting King_ Lotor laid eyes on the three of them from over his desk – _Zarkon’s_ desk – for the first time in seven years as they struggled against the rough hold of the same guards that had banished them just as many years before. He looked them up and down, scowling at the Marmoran blink wolf leaving dirty paw prints on his immaculate floor, eyes lingering on Keith with the same hatred they’d always held, then leering at Allura and Shiro and the matching rings they wore. He appraised the three of them in a sweep.

He smiled, regal and composed. “Welcome back, then,” he greeted, with malice in his eyes.

That night, as Kosmo slept across the foot of his old bed, Keith couldn’t sleep a wink, even back in his old room, even surrounded by familiar old walls, and when he tried to sneak from his room to check on Allura only to find armed guards stationed outside his room, he decided to forgo sleep altogether.

 

“You ready for another round?”

Keith looked up, forced back into the present under Daibbazaal's sweltering red sun in the palace courtyard. Allura was panting, accidentally squeezing water from her bottle halfway down the front of her body suit. Shiro stood leaned against a tree in the shade with a heavily alert Kosmo, watching her like the lovestruck fool he was.

Keith set hard eyes back onto Allura and called her challenge. “Are you?”

She smirked dangerously back, clearly not amused, just like when they were kids. Tucking a stray silver hair up into the knot atop her head, she immediately charged, forcing Keith to block himself with a glare toward Shiro over her shoulder. “Stop staring at her like she’s God’s gift to man – she just _cheated_.”

“She’s my princess,” Shiro said back with an innocent shrug, and he wasn’t even _watching_ them anymore – eyes scanning their surroundings as usual. For the last two days, Shiro watched and scanned almost obsessively – caught every sound, every movement, every shadow. Today, there weren’t any.

It was unnerving that the eagle’s-eye watch Lotor had had on them since their return was suddenly so lax. That for the last couple of days, Keith couldn’t turn around without seeing at least a couple of guards with eyes trained on him, but now they were left fully alone to their devices while they were _training_ , no less. It felt like some kind of trap, had them on edge with seemingly no other choice but to play along.

Shiro's eyes continued to scan this way and that, because even after marrying a princess, he still took pride in being their body guard. “She’s got my full allegiance,” he said, this time biting down on a taunting smile at Keith's expense, since said princess was currently making a fool of him.

Keith rolled his eyes, blade held strong against Allura’s as she smirked down at him and played dirty, dropping into a crouch and kicking his legs out from underneath him and forcing him to lie there, sprawled out and slightly winded. She laughed and bent over him with an outstretched hand, an olive branch he seriously considered yanking down with him for revenge when Shiro suddenly shouted, alarmed.

Shiro was no longer by the tree, but halfway across the courtyard, shield at the ready. Keith followed Shiro with his eyes as he leaned up into a crouch, trying to see what was happening when, just as Kosmo leapt in front of him, Allura pulled him up and rolled them out of the way of an arrow, striking the ground almost exactly where they had been.

Slowly, Allura plucked it from the grass with a confused look toward Shiro who was still facing the palace wall the arrow had flown over. Something flashed up above hovering in the sky.

“A drone,” Keith murmured, ice in his veins.

Allura hesitated. “Do you think…?” she started but couldn’t finish. Didn’t really have to. It only made sense that Lotor was behind this. That this was what the false sense of security had been leading up to. That this was Lotor ordering their demise without so much as a smug parting word again.

Grunting, Allura reared back and heaved her practice blade in a spin toward the drone when it moved, ducking out of the way and sinking back down outside the palace wall as if afraid.

Shiro’s shoulders tensed as he stepped toward the wall, then a loud, startled scream sounded from the other side. Allura gasped.

“That sounded like a _kid_ ,” she said, with the realization that she had just thrown her _blade_ at it.

“Or a threat,” Shiro offered, because that was what he always said.

Annoyed, Allura huffed and rushed toward the palace wall's back gate, Shiro, Kosmo, and Keith hot on her heels.

Behind the palace wall was a meadow of dsvelde stalks, blue and valuable, but overgrown and unmanaged since as long as Keith could remember. The stalks grew thick and tight together, the wind constantly shaking lose and carrying off their spores. They grew tall as full grown _Galrans_ and just as imposing. As kids, all Allura and Keith wanted to do was play in the fields and get in trouble for hiding where the guards couldn’t see them. He looked out at the stalks now and saw what he knew Shiro saw – the perfect place for an attacker to hide.

Keith stood beside Allura against the gate, hands clasping iron bars as they stared out into the field for a sign of whoever had screamed.

There was the drone, still hovering just above the grass, steady in place like a marker. Keith gripped his sword tight and forced open the gate, breaking into a run as Kosmo took after him. Shiro and Allura called after him, took into the field behind him but he didn’t stop.

Lotor had already taken everything from him once. If he was about to do it again, Keith was fighting back this time. He moved through the stalks, quick and silent like the sounds of the rustling wind toward the drone, still hovering in place, still waiting.

Like a beacon.

Or a trap, maybe.

He was nearly directly under the drone now, separated from its owner by a thin row of shrubbery. He braced himself, raising his blade–

A sneeze interrupted him, loud and high pitched, followed by a hissed-out swear. The drone hovered lower toward the voice and Keith jerked, pushing aside the remaining curtain of stalks and closing the distance between himself and the culprit– a young girl with big, round glasses and choppy brown hair who looked no older than thirteen. A fucking _teenager_. She was holding onto a bow too big for her and drowning in an oversized jacket. She rubbed at her nose, looking just as terrified of him as Keith was confused by her.

Keith looked her up and down, lowered his blade when she wouldn’t stop staring at it. “Okay,” he murmured, wondering where this child had even come from and who was missing her. Kosmo padded forward and sniffed at her in a circle. “You’re not–”

“ _Keith_ ,” Shiro hissed, hand gripping his shoulder. He pulled him around with a full force glare. “ _Stop running off like that!_ ” he ordered, wholly _exasperated_ because really, who was Keith if he wasn’t always running off? “We don’t know _who_ could be out here. Lotor could have–”

Keith jerked free, pulling aside the stalks again to reveal their scrawny, teenaged culprit. He shot Shiro a smirk for his shock. “I really think we’ll be fine.”

“ _Oh, my god, don’t hurt me I’m not a fucking criminal_ ,” the girl panicked, flinching back at the sight of Shiro, the big, tall guard. She nearly flung the bow hanging over her shoulder around her neck in her haste. “I didn’t mean to shoot my arrow in there,” she rushed out, her drone hovered protectively above her. “I was practicing way over there in the woods,” she stressed with a frantic point somewhere behind her. She sneezed again, hand flying up to swat at the freeborn spores around her. “I had no clue an arrow could _fly_ this far, and I’ve only had this thing for two days–”

“ _Found my blade!_ ” Allura announced, from somewhere in the tall stalks.

Shiro sighed, rolling his eyes at his wife who tended to relish in ruining his drama even when she wasn't aware of it. He turned hard hazel eyes back onto their tiny culprit, finally lowering his sword. He put on his no-nonsense voice. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

“I told you, I was _practicing_ ,” the girl insisted emphatically. “Not trying to take out any of the royals,” she added with a heavy glare and a sniffle. “And I have _allergies!_ Do you think I’d be out here if I didn’t have to be?!”

Keith hid his snicker behind his hand as he watched his composed, serious, best friend/mature body guard mentor face off against a teenager. “Well then, why are you in the field? You said you were in the _woods_.”

“Obviously, to see where my arrow went, but then _someone threw a blade at me!_ ” the girl explained back, hands on her hips. She sneezed again, looking annoyed at the unintentional end to her short tirade when Allura finally found them.

“There you are,” she huffed with a soft laugh. She stepped through a curtain of tall grass to join them, bright blue eyes trailing immediately to their newest member. “I heard everything! Here’s your arrow back! I’m _so_ _sorry_ I threw my blade at you,” she said, with a wince. “Are you okay?”

Shiro groaned, hand sliding down his face. “ _Allura._ ”

“What?” Allura asked innocently.

Shiro stared, grasping for words as he looked at her. “She shot an arrow over the wall! We don’t know who she _is!_ She could have something to do with _you-know-who_.”

Keith scoffed. “She’s a _kid_ ,” he argued, arm gesturing out in her direction. She stopped in her tracks of cooing at Kosmo, who was all but trying to lie on her.

“I’m _not_ a kid,” the girl snapped, with an indignant glare. “I’m _fifteen_ , and my name is Pidge,” she said, forcefully shoving up the sleeves on her oversized jacket. The movement caught Keith’s eye.

“See?” Keith murmured, noticing the familiar tatters around the jacket’s hood and the unmistakable yellow accent sleeve bands. There was no way… “Not a spy at all.”

“Then what’s with this drone?” Shiro demanded, leering up at the innocently bobbing robot. Keith could see now that it was lit up green, rather than the usual blue.

“Who, Rover?” Pidge asked. She smiled at it like one would look at a pet, shrugging her jacket higher onto her shoulders. “I reprogrammed him,” she said proudly. She looked back to Kosmo who was nosing at her legs, trying to get her to pet him and couldn’t help but grin. “Hey, is this a blink wolf?”

Shiro quirked a brow, ignoring her question, eyes darting back and forth between her and her hovering companion. “But… how did _you_ get one–?”

“Where did you get that jacket?” Keith blurted, uncaring of the silence that followed. He knew it was insane to even think it, but he knew that jacket.

He’d know that jacket anywhere.

“Huh? Why?” Pidge squinted.

Keith met her eyes, curious and lost and. He didn’t even know where to start with this – how to even _explain_ that he was certain the very tattered old jacket she was clutching for warmth was the very same one he’d slept in like a nest when he was a young dumb teen, desperate and stupid in love–

Shiro sighed, eyes soft as he tried to understand. “Keith,” he started softly.

“Allura,” Keith tried instead, because she _had_ to know – she _had_ to understand. She had seen this jacket almost just as much as Keith had.

“ _Wait_.” Pidge looked at him, brows furrowing over narrowed eyes. She pointed at him. “Keith and Allura as in _long-lost_ _prince and princess_ Keith and Allura?” She looked back and forth between the two of them, eyes accusatory, confused. “You’re supposed to be missing.”

In the silence that followed, Keith wondered if they all felt the same impending sense of doom. In all the things they’d discussed and planned out when they’d decided to finally come back, deciding how to answer this question had been the hardest.

“Look,” Allura said evenly, “this isn’t what you’re probably thinking.”

But Pidge wasn’t hearing it, took a slow step backward, not taking her eyes off any of them even as Kosmo whined after her. “Listen, royal secrets and conspiracies are above my paygrade, but I know how this works and I don’t wanna know anything that’s worth my life.”

“Hang on,” Shiro interrupted, frustrated that now he had to mediate _this_. “What are you thinking here? That we faked going missing? For what?”

She glared back, indignant. “I don’t know, _you tell me._ ”

Shiro groaned, somewhere between laughing in disbelief and tearing his own hair out in his frustration. “Nobody faked anything–”

“Tell us how you got that jacket, and we’ll tell you what’s going on.”

“Huh?” Pidge froze, watching Keith like he was something to be wary of.

Allura cleared her throat. “Keith, is that really–?”

“You heard me,” Keith insisted, arms crossing over his middle. Shiro looked to have given up entirely.

“Really?” Pidge squinted. “You’ll tell me? And you’re not gonna, like… send anybody to ‘take care of me’ when I leave here, right?”

“Yeah,” Keith answered, before Allura or Shiro could stop him. He smiled. “And no, this isn’t some kind of take-this-to-your-grave, spy deal if that’s what you’re thinking. I thought you said you weren’t a kid.”

“I’m _not_.”

“So, do we have a deal or not?”

“ _Yeah_ , we have a deal!” she huffed.

“ _Unbelievable_ ,” Allura sighed. “Keith, is this really, you know. Wise?”

She was looking at him the same way she did whenever he missed his mom or Lance or _home_ over the last couple years, but there was nothing she could do about it. Shiro watched him too, looking equally piteous, well out of his element if even Allura didn’t know what to say.

And there was Pidge wearing _Lance’s_ _jacket_. He looked back to Allura. “I don’t care,” he decided.

Allura’s gaze swept over his face, and she sighed, realizing he wasn’t going to change his mind. She smiled in surrender, completely aware of how tightly wrapped she was around Keith’s little finger. “Of course, you don’t.”

“Okay, then,” Pidge hesitated, fiddling with the bow over her shoulder. Kosmo yipped loudly and she thoughtlessly went back to scratching him behind the ears. “So, me and Shay were getting ready to make dinner,” she said to start with, and continued on to tell them all about how two nights ago, the Blue Bandit saved her orphanage. “Oh, wait, if you were really gone all this time, you wouldn’t know who the Blue Bandit is–”

“I know who he is,” Keith said, utterly _shocked_ because back on Altea, he hadn’t gone even a day without at least hearing the name. The Blue Bandit had become something of a legend since he’d left Daibazaal. While on Altea, Keith had tried to learn all he could about him when he couldn’t sleep at night. He holed himself up in one of the palace libraries until Shiro found him in the early morning and made him go to bed. The more he learned, the more he really thought…

And he knew it had been crazy to have suspicions the way he did – he _knew_ that – but somehow, he couldn’t stop himself. He’d known Lance better than he’d known anybody else and he just _knew_ he was right. Even though Shiro always advised him against it, even though Allura damn near begged him not to get his hopes up that Lance was even still alive. It was surreal to think that after all this time, he might not have been so crazy after all.

Pidge gushed and gushed between sneezes and sniffles and smiles at Kosmo about the Blue Bandit’s heroics, from the way he fearlessly jumped right in front of her, to how Hunk punched the guard out in one hit. The way he left his bow and arrows behind, so the orphanage could defend itself if they were ever attacked again. The way he’d left Pidge his own jacket so she could keep warm. “He stayed to talk with us for a bit. It’s so weird that he's just a _person_ ,” she murmured, brows furrowed like she was still processing that bit.

“That sounds like Lance,” Keith said, chin resting over his knees. When he shut his eyes, he could see in his head just how Lance had probably _looked_ as he saved the day like a big shot hero – The set of his brows and the focused look in his eyes as he lined up his shot, the set of his lips as it landed….

He tried to ignore the heat in his face, but with Allura’s and Shiro’s eyes knowingly watching him, it only got worse.

She paused at that, expression going just as smug as Allura’s and Shiro’s. “We asked him a thousand questions, but he didn’t really want to talk about his own heroism for some reason,” she rolled her eyes. “He only really got talkative when I asked him about you.”

“What did he say?” Keith asked, hoarse, like his voice had gone out with the air he suddenly couldn’t breathe.

“God, it’d be shorter to tell you what he _didn’t_ say,” she scoffed, and proceeded to tell him all the ways Lance still thought he was strong, and admirable, and too good for him, and impulsive, and amazing and perfect and p _retty_. He still took every chance he could to talk about how _pretty_ he thought Keith was and how much he still _loved_ him with all his heart and–

“He wouldn’t just say it,” Pidge started after a moment – ticks and ticks of Keith telling himself to just keep his head on straight, to not melt into a puddle of goo just because Lance still– “But he probably thinks you’re dead, you know.”

Keith froze.

“So,” she continued, looking uncomfortably down at the ground, “I’m not trying to be, you know, rude to the crown or anything, but it’s kind of fucked-up if you’ve just been here the whole time.”

“We _haven’t_ ,” Keith stressed, telling himself it wasn’t her fault for thinking it, but he couldn’t help feeling offended. “I’d _never_ do that to him. I would never hurt him like that.”

“Then where _were_ you?” Pidge pressed, careful and curious. “Why haven’t you told him you’re back? How long have you even _been_ back?”

“Well,” Shiro started, looking to Allura for help, because they hadn’t had the time to discuss what to _say_ – what was even _safe_ to say in their predicament. It was impossible to know what Lotor was planning, and by that extent, what was even coming for them.

All Keith knew was that trying to find Lance now, with all this going on... It would be irresponsible. There were a thousand reasons to fear their next move – to fear what could happen next, but disappointing Lance… couldn’t be one of them right now.

Lotor had to be first priority. That meant Lance would have to wait.

“We’ve only been back for two days,” Allura said finally, emphatically. “And we don’t think we should be telling anyone we’re back just yet. It would only cause problems we can’t afford if we want to stay this close to Lotor, and I _promise_ , once this is all over, we’ll come forward about everything that happened, and where we’ve been and why we’re being so secretive, but for now, you’re sworn to secrecy that you’ve even seen us.”

Eyes wide with shock, Pidge reared back. “I – wait, are you in some kind of danger?”

“Yeah,” Keith answered, before Allura should sugarcoat it, before Shiro could stop him from answering entirely. “And if Lance knows I’m back, then he’ll put himself in danger, too.”

“ _And_ ,” Shiro added for Pidge's sake even if it was borderline insulting, “it could put a lot of other innocent people in danger.”

“I know,” Keith griped.

“ _Wow_ ,” Pidge murmured. She looked, wide eyed from one of them to the next, to the next like she didn’t know what to say. “Wait, one more question. Why’s this happening now?”

Keith shared a glance with his cousin, then with Shiro who was deep in thought trying to come up with some satisfactory way to explain this, but there was only so much they could safely say without risking everything.

Pidge snorted, shaking her head. “Alright, I got it. It’s confidential. No more questions asked, then, I guess I trust you.”

“Wait, you _do?_ ” Shiro asked, back to being comically skeptical as he looked at her. She only laughed back.

“Yeah, sure,” she answered with a shrug and another sneeze. “And I mean, if you’re lying, this is all just gonna blow up in your faces anyway,” she shrugged.

Shiro blinked back, lost for words as Keith and Allura shared a look.

“Okay,” Pidge said, casting a sad smile down at Kosmo, “I’ve been gone long enough. I should get back before someone comes looking for me.”

“Wait,” Keith said, making a decision on a whim. “Shiro will go with you.”

Shiro gaped. _“_ Oh, he _will–?”_

“He’ll make sure you get back safe,” Keith continued over him, trying and failing to subdue his smirk. “And he’ll bring food back to your orphanage.”

“That’s really sweet of you, Keith,” Allura commented appreciatively. Keith didn’t know how to tell her she was looking at him all maternal again.

“Sure, yeah, very sweet of Keith,” Shiro drawled. “Hang tight,” he said, turning and heading back for the palace gate. “I’ll go get rations prepared,” he said, taking quick strides away from them.

Allura stared after him, deciding it would be more convenient to wait for Shiro outside the stalks. “You better make this up to him,” she chastised through a laugh.

“It’s for a good cause,” Keith shrugged, “but fine.” He was sure Shiro didn’t actually mind – he and Allura were always telling him that one day he was going to have to start being more diplomatic. And…

Well, Lance had tried to protect this girl and her orphanage. Keith wanted to protect it, too.

“Hey, your majesty?” Pidge spoke up hesitantly. She was staring down at the sleeves of her jacket. She cleared her throat. “Do you want this jacket?”

Keith blinked. “Huh?” He looked at her, drowning in the thing that had once been the main identifying characteristic of the love of his life. He looked at that jacket and could already feel it on his skin like he was wearing it again. “No, it’s okay,” Keith managed. Because even though he’d been missing in action for seven long _years_ , he was still the prince of Daibazaal. He still put his people before himself. “You need it more than I do.”

Shiro returned nearly half a varga later, toting two hovercarts of hot rations from the kitchens. He pushed one off on Pidge who only pretended to be annoyed about it. Then they were off with Kosmo in tow, through the field and toward the town. He and Allura sent Pidge off with a promise to meet again when things were safe. Keith sent her off with Lance’s jacket and what felt like the remainder of his heart.

 

“Well, I’d say you handled that very well.”

Keith looked over and nearly side-stepped into the wall. “Really?” he asked. Allura smiled, only just barely visible in the dark like this. She stepped into him, bumping him gently into the wall again in her stride.

“Yeah,” she answered. “Very diplomatic. Aunt Krolia would be proud.”

Keith looked at her again, trying to hide that he was as Allura walked on a bit ahead through the old castle depths. They passed old dungeons and familiar dark corridors, using the dim lighting along the floors to see. It had been seven years, but that wasn’t stopping Allura, who always seemed to know exactly what she was doing. Even during their banishment, she’d held it together – kept strong for _his_ sake like she’d done it all before and she’d gladly do it again. If she was telling him he was worth being proud of, then his inferiority complex was just going to have to be wrong for once.

“Yeah,” he admitted, hands going up to tug at the end of his braid. “I guess she would be.”

“Absolutely,” Allura nodded, confident and sure of herself like she did everything. She led them just a bit further, turning right at the nearest fork and– “Here we are!” she announced.

She sounded just a little shocked to have been right as she led them excitedly into what had been Voltron’s hangar. It had become dusty and dirty during Voltron’s absence, but any day now, that was going to change.

Voltron was coming back. _Their parents_ were coming back.

It felt like a lie, felt a bit like a conspiracy not to _talk_ about it – to have that Pidge girl look him right in the eye and not say anything, even if it was the only thing he wanted to talk about these days. His _mom_ would be home soon.

And then, everything could go back to normal.

“When they get back, I’m going to be sitting right here,” Allura spoke up. She sat on the ground, legs folded just like the last time they were here. She pat the spot beside her and Keith lowered himself down. They sat knee-to-knee as they stared up at where Voltron would have been, and it was like they were kids again, roaming the castle depths behind their guards’ backs to see if Voltron was _real_. “And my mom and dad will step out of their lions and I’m going to completely tackle them to the floor,” she said with a soft laugh. “It’ll be very undignified. Shiro will have a field day.”

Keith hummed, his own smile biting into his cheeks as he thought about how he would react himself when he finally saw his mom for the first time in all these years. If the way he reacted to just seeing his mother from Allura's screen mere quintents ago as she told him, through a watery smile, that they could all go back _home_ – to head back to Daibazaal and Voltron would catch up with them back _home_ – was anything to go by, he knew it wouldn’t be any different. “Shiro will laugh at me, too,” he said. “And I’m always undignified. It’ll take the attention right off you.” Allura scoffed, shaking her head.

“So,” she fixed her eyes on the high-up ceilings, where Voltron would lower itself. “What are we going to do about Lotor?”

“You’re asking _me?_ ” Keith blinked. “You’re the one who had _queen_ training, Allura–”

“What would you _do?_ ” Allura interrupted, impatient, teasing and always encouraging underneath. Keith had a hunch that she only put him through strategy scenarios like this to take it out on him that she’d had to endure princess training in their teens while he was out running the streets with a peasant and being the talk of the town, so if she’d had to suffer, he did too apparently.

“I don’t know,” he scoffed. “We don’t have a _choice_ but to watch our backs, stick together, keep everything under wraps and wait for our parents to come back. They’ll know what to do.”

“Okay but say they _don’t_ know what to do,” Allura countered, lifting her knees to rest her head on and Keith could see now that she was worried and scared, and everything he felt, too. “Or say it takes them longer to get here than they think and Lotor is still a threat like this. What would you do?”

He could see it in her eyes exactly what she was most afraid of. The thought that they may have to kill their own cousin made him anxious, too. For so long now, he’d been able to not have to think about it. “I don’t think we can really plan for this. I think Lotor will always be one step ahead of us, just like he was when he successfully got rid of us. But,” he contemplated, thought about all the things he'd accomplished since then. All the things Allura had accomplished and Shiro, too. All the things they’d done together. They'd managed to make it safely, unimpeded back to Daibazaal together. “I think when the time comes, we'll know what to do.”

“But–”

“You’ll do the right thing,” Keith insisted.

Allura blinked, stewing on it and weighing it in her mind – pensive and practical like always. Allura didn’t believe it, especially lately with how things had turned out, but Keith knew that one day, she'd be queen. “ _We'll_ do the right thing,” she amended. “You and Shiro are always there for me.”

Keith hummed. “Yeah, yeah. Always,” he said, and wished he was better with feelings and honesty. His relationship with Allura had never been exactly quintessential. For cousins, they’d grown up just like siblings, though she’d always looked over him like a mom, and those lines were almost comically blurry, but Keith liked to think it only meant he could rely on her the most.

“So,” she started again, this time even more hesitant, and she looked right at him, giving him no room to hide as she dealt a death blow. “What are you going to do about Lance?” she asked, and he felt it like a punch in the gut.

Keith swallowed, felt his nails digging into his palms. “Nothing,” he said before he could change his mind. “Why do I have to do anything?”

“Don’t you _want_ to?”

“Of course, I do,” he admitted. More than _anything_ he wanted to. He wanted to see Lance again and talk to him and hold him and never let go and– “But I learned my lesson. Priorities and consequences and,” he scoffed, “my stupid _place_ in the world as a hybrid. I’m a prince and I need to act like it,” he parroted, and it felt like ash in his mouth.

Allura stared, unimpressed. “Okay well, good Uncle Zarkon impression,” she rolled her eyes.

“Well–” Keith huffed, “–look, there are a thousand other things I should be worrying about than my old _boyfriend_ –”

“Who turned out to be the Blue Bandit,” Allura said smugly, and Keith couldn’t help but smile to himself.

He knew it would have been irresponsible and selfish to track Lance down in the middle of all this. To find him and put him in danger all over again just because he'd never been able to stay away, but.

He was just so _proud_ of Lance.

Lance who lived and fought and never stopped picking himself back up and never quit.

Lance who still _loved_ him. Who somehow, after everything, still _loved_ him. Loved him like a love story. Like happily ever after and true love and soul mates and forever – loved him like the power of their love combined was stronger than _anything_ , made them invincible…

He could feel Allura’s eyes on him, boring into the side of his head, and all she wanted to do was _help_ him, but he was the same wreck he’d always been. “I don’t know what to do,” he admitted. “What should I do?”

Allura stared. “I didn’t mean to push you into a crisis like this,” she apologized. Keith met her gaze and she flashed a small, encouraging smile. “I know you’re feeling… _a lot_ , but you know you don’t have to be _a prince_ with me. We’re all alone, right? You can just be Keith,” she sighed. It pushed a bit of the weight from his chest, and he knew she meant it, knew she was thinking of similar conversations they’d had back in the day concerning herself and Shiro. “The Keith I know has loved Lance his whole life and he’s never _once_ been responsible about it,” she grinned.

Keith snorted. “ _Yeah, I know_. That was kind of the problem.”

“Well, things are different now. You’re the returned prince of Daibazaal and he’s the Blue Bandit. There really don’t have to be any rules.”

“You married our bodyguard, you don’t get to have an opinion on rules.”

“Speaking of Shiro,” Allura said gently with a hard punch to Keith’s arm, “we should get back upstairs before he and Kosmo get back and have an aneurism about us being down here ‘alone and unguarded.’”

They trudged back up through the castle depths, sneaking through nearly forgotten back ways and tunnels hidden behind old portraits until they wound up back at their rooms. Allura didn’t pressure him any more about it, but Keith came to a decision.

He had been powerless before, as a dumb, reckless teen, but Allura was right. He was the returned prince of Daibazaal, and Lance was the Blue Bandit. When it was all said and done, all over and dispensed with, they could do it all _right_. This time, he'd change the rules. There was no one strong or powerful enough to stop them.

*

As a child, Keith was told legend upon legend of the Mighty Voltron, defender of the universe almost every night. He’d curl up with Allura and his mother would tuck them in, and she’d speak in hushed tones of Voltron’s bravery and strength – how many people and planets he had saved, and _yes, yes my little stars, Voltron is real_.

He had never _seen_ Voltron – Allura hadn’t either, even if she liked to say she did – but he knew in his heart that his mother was right. Voltron was here on the planet, safe in the castle until he was needed again – _if_ he was ever needed again – and it made Keith feel safe.

When his mother left, he and Allura stayed up late into the night, speaking in hushed whispers under Allura's sheets about what Voltron was like – what it was like to be a _paladin_. Maybe when they were older, they’d find out. Maybe they’d get to be paladins, too.

To their surprise, they’d managed to find Voltron in a small handful of years. Thanks in no small part to one strong-headed, fourteen-year-old Allura going through her rebellious phase, an even more stubborn eleven-year-old Keith who refused to be left behind. Especially if it meant being left behind with Lotor whose worsening attitude had become far less preferable to deal with than strolling the castle depths alone late into the night to the detriment of their guards.

They found Voltron in an underground hangar just inside the castle walls, standing so tall, they’d had to crane their necks straight up, and still couldn’t see all of his face. He was a bit rusty and old looking, but still every bit as mighty and intimidating as Krolia had always said.

“Father is the Red Paladin,” Allura whispered, with an awestruck expression upward. “That means he controls that lion,” she said, pointing to the red lion that formed Voltron’s right hand. “Uncle Zarkon must be the head,” she continued.

Keith’s eyes roved up to the torso and head, saw red wings protruding from the back. The black lion.

“Your mother controls the blue one, and mine the yellow,” Allura listed, pointing to each in turn. “And Commander Kolivan gets the green one.”

And Keith stared up with wide innocent eyes at each component that represented his _family_ , all come together to form one big unstoppable machine and tried to remember a time he’d ever felt prouder and more amazed by what he’d come from.

They visited Voltron a few more times afterwards before moving on, on to studies and training, and things that mattered in the present in a way that Voltron just _hadn’t_ for a long, long time.

Until he did.

For the first time in a century, the universe needed Voltron again. The paladins, selfless and heroic responded to the call as soon as they’d received it, immediately gathering up supplies and suiting up.

“Mom!” Keith shouted, running with all his might across the hangar to catch her at the Blue Lion, loading in her bags. She caught him by the shoulders, trying to soothe him, but he felt like he was shaking apart. “You can’t just _leave!_ ”

“I wasn’t leaving just yet, my little star,” Krolia said back, voice soft, intentionally soothing. It didn’t work.

“I know – _I know_ ,” Keith stammered, trying to swallow the thought that his mother was going into danger, and may never come _back_. “But–”

“The universe needs us,” Krolia interrupted patiently. Her hands cupped his face, held it like something precious as she looked down into his eyes. “Someone has to help and we’re the ones who can.”

“But–”

“I don’t want to leave you, either,” Krolia continued, eyes heavy on his and Keith finally saw that they were sad. “This will be hard, I know, but you are strong. You and Lotor and Allura – Daibazaal looks to you, now.”

Keith felt a sob welling up in his throat but refused to let it break.

“I will fight my hardest,” Krolia promised, her own eyes beginning to water. “And you will stay here and look after Lotor with Allura. And I _will_ come back to you,” she swore with a lurch that pulled Keith forcefully into her arms. He rested his head against her shoulder, done fighting his tears, done fighting at all as he squeezed her back.

Allura stood off near the Red Lion sandwiched between her own parents as they held on with seemingly all their strength.

Lotor stood, stoic, against the hangar wall. Zarkon entered Black and didn’t turn back.

After a blur of tears and embraces and promises, Voltron left, and Lotor became acting King, taking no longer than a few quintants to call his first order.

Shiro found them in the courtyard, running right up to them and gasping like he’d run a great distance, eyes wide with terror. “Your highnesses,” he breathed, guiding them quickly behind a pillar as he glanced all around them. He’d only just become their official personal guard recently, so despite having known them their whole lives, he still insisted on calling them by their titles. Allura started to correct him, but Shiro stopped her. “Prince Lotor is sending his guards to find you right now, but I wanted you to hear this from me,” he rushed out.

“What’s going on?” Allura demanded, taking on her own air of fanaticism as Keith tried to find his own voice.

“Prince Lotor just signed the order – he’s having you banished,” Shiro whispered.

“ _What?_ ” Keith rasped.

“He’s sending you to Altea – there’s a ship prepared and everything–”

“ _Altea?_ ” Allura interrupted, looking smaller and smaller, and it triggered something in Keith, something that had him stepping forward, something that made him want to protect her. “What are we supposed to do on Altea?!”

“You have to listen,” Shiro pleaded, with a frantic glance around them, swearing when they heard footsteps. “They’re on their way right now to ship you two out of here. This is _happening_ ,” he stressed with a pleading look down at Keith who never took anything without a fight. “There’s no stopping it. I don’t know what Lotor is planning, but if he wants the two of you out of the way so you can’t stop him, then Daibazaal is in trouble.”

Keith glared. “Shiro, we can’t just–”

“Keith, it’s my job now to keep you _safe_ , not start a revolution,” Shiro stressed, looking a mix of frustrated and sympathetic. “If you two just go along with this, then I’ll find you and we’ll figure out what to do from there,” he rushed out in a murmur as the footsteps neared closer from behind Shiro, revealing all four of Lotor’s personal guards.

Zethrid stepped forward first, the most intimidating of the four, standing about two heads higher than even Shiro. “Captain Shirogane,” she greeted with knowing eyes and a wry smile. She stepped closer, resting a powerful hand onto his shoulder. “I trust you’ve told the royals what’s about to happen?”

Shiro glared, jerking his shoulder from Zethrid’s grasp. He turned, rooting himself in front of his charges. “I didn’t think Prince Lotor would spare his cousins the courtesy of letting them know to their faces,” he said, triggering a malicious smirk from Ezor.

“Hm,” she murmured, lithe legs carrying her forward to lean against Zethrid. “ _King_ Lotor’s got a lot on his plate right now. Making a lot of big changes,” she said with a raised brow over taunting eyes locked on Keith. “Two of which you know about now. The _third_ –”

“ _Ezor_ ,” Axca hissed in warning. Ezor merely rolled her eyes.

“He _said_ I could be the one to tell him,” she snapped, rolling bright blue eyes to rest onto Shiro. Her lips quirked. “The third change,” she started again, smile curling into a deeper smirk, “would be _you_ , Captain Shirogane. You are to leave with Voltron’s last fleet. You’re on the front lines.”

“ _No!_ ” Allura gasped, latching onto Shiro’s arm.

“I’m afraid, yes,” Ezor simpered back, with a determined step forward. Zethrid and Axca drew in behind her, holding Shiro back while Narti and Ezor closed in on Allura and Keith. “So, I suppose it _is_ a good thing Shirogane was the one to tell you, after all. Now you’ve said your goodbyes.”

Narti seized Keith around the wrists, spinning him around to force his hands behind his back. Ezor did the same to Allura. They were both in too much shock to be able to stop it.

Zethrid hauled Shiro up by the arms, marching him back toward the castle, appearing amused as Shiro tried to fight her.

“Shiro!” Keith shouted, strength rendered useless in Narti’s stronger hold. “ _No!_ ”

“Don’t worry!” Shiro shouted back. “Stay calm! You’ll be okay!”

“Shiro!” Allura shouted as he disappeared into the castle, leaving the two of them alone for the first time since they’d met him.

“Oh, there, there, Princess,” Ezor cooed, wrenching her forward, toward the hangars as Narti followed suit. “Captain Shirogane has always been a strong fighter. He might even survive most of the battle.”

They were brought through the hangar to a shuttle just big enough for the four of them, then unceremoniously shoved inside. They were forced into the back as Narti and Ezor piloted them toward what they assumed was Altea.

With the back hatch closed, separating them from their captors, Allura broke down, crying helplessly into Keith’s shoulder as he tried to keep it together for her. For the both of them.

“He won’t die,” he said, the words hollow and ashen on his tongue. His eyes stung and his throat was closing up. He didn’t want to speak anymore. “Shiro is stronger than _anyone_ ,” he said, voice cracking on a sob. “He won’t _die_.”

It was the same thing he’d been telling himself for five quintants when he couldn’t sleep, alone in his bed, eyes stuck roving the ceiling. _She’s stronger than anyone_ , he’d tell himself. His mom wouldn’t…

He broke, crying into Allura’s hair. He’d lost _everyone_. Allura and Lance were all he–

“ _Lance_ ,” he gasped as he _realized_ and his heart shattered all over again, tried to choke him with the fragments. “No, _no_ , he won’t – Lance won’t know what happened to me! He’ll think I _left_ him – he’ll think–”

_“You’ll be married off within a few years – you’ll forget all about me.”_

“Oh, Keith,” Allura murmured, head lifting off his shoulder, trapping him in watery, blue eyes as she pulled him gently into her arms. She rubbed his back and let him cry, told him things would be alright even if they weren’t, even though she was hurting too, because yes, his mother was strong, and so was Shiro, but Allura was the strongest person he knew.

“I didn’t even get to say goodbye.”

Allura squeezed him tighter.

Keith had never been to Altea, though he knew Allura had once as a small child, before he was even born. She didn’t remember much about it other than the Altean Princess she’d made friends with for their short visit.

It was her castle they were left in, drug forcibly through the doors and dropped onto the floor of the throne room as Princess Romelle looked on in horror.

“Princess Allura and Prince Keith for your alliance as promised,” Ezor drawled with a smirk. She was gone before they’d even managed to pick themselves up. And Princess Romelle, who turned out to be entirely a nonthreat, ran down with her guards to help them.

“I hear,” she began in hushed tones after she’d forced her court to leave the throne room, “that you can do some wonderous magic, Princess Allura.” When Allura gave a hesitant nod, Princess Romelle deflated, posture lessening to reveal someone who couldn’t have been much older than Allura, herself. “What I’m about to say _must not_ leave this room, but,” she gathered herself with a sigh. “Altea is _dying_. Like the Balmera almost did five centuries ago – like _Earth_ ,” she stressed. “And only magic can save it, but I… don’t have any,” she admitted with an even larger sigh. “I’m the youngest in my family and none of us have the gift. It died on my mother’s side almost a century ago, but if you have it… I need you to teach me. And help save Altea? That’s all I want from you.”

“That’s all?” Keith demanded, stepping forward. “That doesn’t make sense. We were just _banished_.”

“Oh,” Princess Romelle murmured, looking pained as she shrank away even more. Allura pressed a hand into his shoulder, pulling him back a bit. “I’m not involved with any of that. Your prince Lotor simply contacted me and asked if there were any way he could trade our alliance for a favor.”

“Your alliance?” Allura echoed. “For _what?_ ”

“Voltron is flying again,” Romelle said, like she were talking to children. “And the war will only grow. If something happens on our planets, we need each other. So, we need Altea to heal.”

Allura looked as if she’d aged ten decophebes. “How long are we supposed to stay here?”

She hesitated in answering. “Your prince, Lotor… he didn’t specify wanting you back. I figured at least until Altea is healed, or until you’ve taught me.” She bit her tongue as Allura shut her eyes, arms folding around herself. Keith pulled her to his side.

“We’ve had a long day,” he managed to the princess, wanting nothing more than to curl into a ball himself. “Can we pick this up tomorrow?”

Their rooms were in the same hall, but that night, Keith found himself tucked tightly underneath Allura’s sheets, just like when they were kids and his mother would tell them stories of Voltron’s victory.

*

“Hey, you’re burning the food!”

Lance jumped, blinked himself back into reality where a plume of smoke was wafting right out of the pot he was manning. Frantically, he swatted at the smoke, noting that nothing even smelled like _food_ anymore. This was why Hunk usually insisted on cooking because Lance was indeed, burning their lunch.

“Sorry!” Lance exclaimed, rushing over to remove the pot from the fire with a towel too thin, lightly burning his hands in the process. He shook them out, wincing. “Sorry, buddy, I–”

“I know,” Hunk huffed, though he wasn’t all that mad. In fact, he looked sympathetic, just a bit taunting. He set down the bow and arrow set he was crafting in order to take over cooking. He cleared his throat, smiling in relief as he finally managed to get the food to stop smoking so much, working his magic and saving things that Lance had nearly irreparably damaged, as always. “I know how you get.”

“I’m _sorry_ ,” Lance stressed, albeit, sheepishly. “I can’t focus lately.” He stepped aside, allowing Hunk to work his magic and turn the smoky mush he'd been mindlessly stirring for who knew how long into food.

It wasn’t all that unusual for him to be out of focus and spacey. He’d been like that his whole life, but he couldn’t pretend it wasn’t different lately, couldn’t pretend he didn’t know why.

He felt it just as real as the necklace hanging from his neck that he was almost all alone now. That he’d lost Keith and his family… his mom and dad and his siblings… that if he hadn’t found Hunk so soon after, then he wouldn’t have anybody.

He’d never been good at being alone.

“It’s just that that girl got me thinking a lot,” Lance admitted, because he felt like it was eating away at him, felt like his brain was a frazzled mess and that Hunk knew it and that he was only lying to himself the longer he didn’t talk about it. “It's like it’s all fresh again. Losing everyone.”

Hunk looked up at him, with wide, sad eyes and a pursed mouth. He knew Hunk knew exactly what he felt. “You’ve got me. We have each other.”

“Yeah,” Lance said, after a moment. Hunk had found him, running into the woods, a shaking, sobbing mess after the massacre of the first riot. Hunk had been hiding there, waiting for his own family to meet up. When Lance told him, lifeless and numb from the _shock_ of what he’d seen, about the massacre he still didn’t understand how he’d just narrowly missed, Hunk went silent, too. He helped Lance get cleaned up and they stayed near the town in case Hunk’s family…. In case. And when they never did, he stuck with Lance and they’d never left each other, ever. “I know.”

“And we’re _going_ to find Keith,” Hunk promised, eyes down as if he was remembering the same thing. “I promised you that.”

Lance bit his tongue. He _knew_ all Hunk wanted to do was cheer him up and keep him hoping, but it was getting hard to keep hoping. Lance had been talking himself down since day one from thoughts of Keith in danger or hurt or worse. He’d considered the possibility that Keith was perfectly alive and well, but just didn’t want to be found and it hurt like a _bitch_. He had to think that Keith was fine, and that there was a reason he was staying away.

Because if he thought otherwise…

“I know,” he managed finally, because it was easier. Because it made Hunk happy and it made his own mind stop spiraling.

“Good,” Hunk nodded, looking relieved, stirring the food with more determination. “And when we finally find him, and he sees you again after all this time, he's totally gonna swoon about you being this big, gruff outlaw now.”

“Sure, yeah. A prince and his outlaw,” Lance chortled. “Maybe by then, you’ll have the confidence to talk to Shay like a normal person.”

Hunk laughed too, though there was no hiding the red tint to his cheeks, but their laughter was cut short by the sound of the nearby waterfall ceasing to fall, then starting back up again all at once as tons of water hit hard rock. They looked toward the small waterfall that hid their camp, already knowing who it was.

Coran, the Altean sorcerer, was one of the most powerful magic-users Daibazaal had. He was so well-known and famous for his craft, that a potion, or spell, or even wisdom from him was sure to be a cure-all. He used to run a small shop in town, but since the planet had fallen on such hard times since Lotor’s takeover, Coran didn’t like to take any money.

He was also the only other person who knew where they lived and how to get there. He usually brought them food, or medicine, or potions and any news the boys tended to miss while living in the woods, but today, he didn’t have anything.

Today, he approached them from the bushes, looking winded, and excited, and wet from the waterfall. His hair was a mess, bright pink leaves poking out left and right from his bright red hair, mustache utterly disheveled, but he was a mess of boundless energy. “Oh, thank goodness you’re here! Have you heard the news?” he demanded. Hunk and Lance shared a look.

“No?” Lance answered.

“What happened?” Hunk asked back, having caught Coran’s frazzled energy.

“I hoped so,” Coran hissed excitedly, “I hoped you hadn’t heard so I could be the one to tell you!”

“Tell us what?” Lance managed through a small laugh at Coran’s antics.

“There’s going to be a tournament!” Coran announced, looking like he was just about ready to start bouncing in place. He looking overjoyed for news so trivial. “In Sector Two!”

“Oh, cool,” Hunk allowed, shoulders relaxing, though it was a little weird. Daibazaal hadn’t thrown any type of event in years – not since before the war started and Voltron left, leaving Lotor in charge.

“But that’s not even the best _part_ ,” Coran stressed, smile nearly taking up his entire face as he baited and baited them. “Okay, so the tournament will be held in two days and Lotor will select the winner to be new bodyguards–”

“What’s the tournament?” Lance asked lazily.

Hunk hummed. “What’s he need new bodyguards for? He hasn’t even been seen outside the castle in _months_.”

“ _I’m getting there!_ ” Coran snapped. Lance and Hunk stifled their laughter. “As I was saying: Lotor is having an archery tournament to find new bodyguards for the prince and princess!”

Lance blinked, the world around him slowly starting to warp oddly around him and he told himself that Coran must have missed telling them some really big news long ago. Something about a new prince and princess being crowned somewhere in the middle of all Daibazaal’s _mess_ , because Coran couldn’t be saying what it sounded like he was saying. “What do you mean?” he managed. And Coran smiled the warm, proud, honored smile that had been there tugging at his lips just underneath all the mania all along.

“Princess Allura and Prince Keith,” Coran said, contented. “They’re back.”

Coran continued to speak, speculating about where they had been all this time, since that was still a mystery – continued to wonder how long they had truly been back as opposed to the small handful of vargas they were supposed to believe, but Lance could barely hear him.

“They’re alive,” he whispered, raw and desperate, he felt like he might cry.

Hunk looked just as short of breath as Lance felt. “See?” he said, nudging against his shoulder with a watery smile. “I told you.”

“You know,” Coran started, “the prize for the winner is a kiss from Princess Allura, herself.”

Lance let out a watery chuckle unbidden, thinking back to the tomboy he remembered from brief moments of his childhood, the one who punched like punches could kill and played dirty at street sports until she was forced back inside the castle to act like a princess as she grew into her teens. Had probably been bitter about it ever since. “I’m sure she’ll love that.”

“You have to compete,” Coran spoke up softly. “There’s no better archer than the Blue Bandit, and I’m sure Prince Keith has heard all about it,” he edged, carefully. “I’m sure the prince might be a bit upset if you didn’t at least make an appearance.”

“Me? _Go?!_ ” Lance sputtered out. He choked on a disbelieving laugh, tried to clear his throat. “I couldn’t go, I – Lotor would have me killed on the _spot_ if he actually shows up, and _Keith–!_ I’m not – I’m a criminal now and he’s still a _prince_ , it’s – it’s worse than it was before!”

“You’ve got to be kidding me with this – you’re not _criminals_ ,” Coran gaped. “You’re _heroes_.”

Hunk and Lance shared a flabbergasted look, unable to help dissolving into helpless laughter.

“Okay, well that’s news to us,” Hunk laughed out.

Lance snorted. “Does _Lotor_ know that?”

“Alright, fine, _laugh_ ,” Coran rolled his eyes. “But all of Daibazaal knows the truth. They know you’re heroes. For the last couple vargas, all anyone’s been talking about is you two saving that orphanage. Another good deed for Hunk and the Blue Bandit, Daibazaal’s Heroes in Denial, apparently.”

“Okay, Coran, we get it,” Hunk mumbled, face burning at the endless praise. “But you know, Lance,” he started albeit hesitantly. “Coran has a point. You’re not… beneath anyone. You’re not a bad person, you’re the nicest person I know, and you deserve to at least see Keith. You should go.”

Lance felt his breath catch in his throat at the idea of seeing Keith. Being in the same place as him and maybe touching him, talking to him, just. _Looking_ at him again. He wondered what Keith would _say_ or how he would look – how different he looked if he even did at all. He wondered what he’d think of how Lance had turned out. If he’d want to pick up where they left off or–

“Lance?”

Lance still had so many questions, so many doubts and reservations, but despite all of it, Keith was the love of his life. Lance couldn’t just not see him. He’d never be strong enough for that, had never even had the _choice_.

“I’ll go,” he decided. Coran and Hunk sighed in relief, and Lance grinned - felt a little more like himself than he'd felt in a while. “I’m the fucking Blue Bandit, _dammit._ ”

Hunk grinned. “Great! But, wait, there’ll – there’s gonna be guards all over the place! We gotta–”

“Don’t you worry about that,” Coran interrupted with a wink – the knowing kind that Lance knew all too well. “We’ll get it all worked out. Lotor won’t even know you’re there,” he rambled, continuing on and on about all the ways they could make this happen, all the ways they could slip in and out right under Lotor’s nose, but Lance couldn’t keep focused on that.

He felt like he’d ascended. Part of him thought he was dreaming, but in two days’ time, after seven years, he was going to see Keith again.

*

All Lance’s life, he’d known about Coran, the Altean sorcerer, which was undoubtedly a redundant term for an Altean, who would have had magic since birth, but Coran was only the third Altean Lance had ever met who wanted to talk to him, so he couldn’t help but find it embarrassingly impressive.

He owned a magic shop not too far from Lance’s house. He saw it everyday on the way to and from school until eventually, he’d risked a look inside and found Coran to be. Interesting.

Not only did Coran have a lot of Altean magic, he had a lot of _powerful_ Altean magic – enough to power his entire store’s crystals on his own. Enough to never have to lift a finger again. And anyway, he used it specifically for clearing out the suldjing insects from the back room and heating up his cold lunch, respectively.

When Lance turned fifteen, he hired him with poorly veiled excitement as something like an assistant, even though he didn’t have any magic himself – could barely do anything Coran couldn’t already do. Still, it meant the world to Lance and his family.

Having a job now apparently made him some kind of model citizen or something in the eyes of his parents and his other human classmates. Keith seemed to think so, too, not that Lance could fucking imagine _why_ , but Keith seemed to react that way to just about everything Lance did these days even if it was a bad look. It wasn’t smart for the prince to be so enamored with Lance’s humanity – with humanity at all, especially since Keith’s own humanity had had him in hot water since day one.

Lately, it was worse.

Lately, there were whispers and murmurs about Prince Keith disappearing from the palace again and again. Lately, there were sightings of the prince sneaking around the kingdom at night alone looking like he didn’t want to be seen, and other times, he was seen skulking through the shadows with an unknown _somebody_.

Consequently, Keith had been scarce the last few weeks – closer to a couple months. The only thing keeping Lance from worrying himself sick was his new job. Up until now, anyway.

The whole thing sat against his rib cage like a two-ton weight, so heavy he felt like he couldn’t breathe with it, and as he entered Coran’s shop five minutes late from school, it dropped into his gut. And it sat in his gut as he started his shift, thoughts drifting to Keith across the kingdom and what he was doing right now. It coiled into a tight, uncomfortable _ball_ in his gut as he wondered – frantically – if the weeks since Lance had seen him was more than the usual waiting for an opening to meet. His gut turned full over as he thought, with oncoming horror, that maybe this was it. Maybe they’d finally been found out and Keith was being _forced_ to stay put in the palace and any minute now, Galran guards would find _him_ –

It took Coran dropping a crate of merchandise right in front of him onto the counter for him to come back down, but his gut was still turning. His nerves were still frazzled, and he knew it was because he’d been keeping it all to himself for so long, this _thing_ between Keith and himself. This whole thing was so much bigger than him now.

Teeth clenching, he felt like the words would just rocket up his throat and he wouldn’t be able to do anything to stop it, he was so desperate for someone to just _understand_ , but he couldn’t deny it anymore. He needed help. Advice. Someone to keep him from doing something irreparably _stupid_.

Who he wanted was his _mom_ , but she could never know. He’d learned by now that he rarely got what he wanted, though. “Coran, can you keep a secret?”

Coran paused in sipping at his juniberry juice, roving questioning blue eyes off the order hologram, over to Lance who stared resolutely back, almost desperate enough to beg. Coran hummed. “Well, what kind of secret would we be discussing?” he asked with a mature calmness to it that made Lance think it was an invitation. An assurance that Lance was safe to talk about whatever this was. That Coran would listen and try to understand to the best of his abilities. And Lance, who had never breathed a word of this to anyone, looked back at Coran and wished to have that optimism.

He took a breath, fingernails biting into his palms on the countertop he spoke down to. “Okay, just. I’m really desperate here and I need advice. I don’t know what to do so. Here’s the thing. I’ve got this friend who’s really special. I mean, like, _really_ special. More special than some dirty human like me,” he admitted. It was the thousandth time he’d thought it since he met Keith, but the first time he’d said it out loud.

“You know that’s not true,” Coran said gently. Patiently. Coran had had the patience of a saint but one of Lance's inadvertent specialties was running patience very _thin_.

“Yes, it is,” Lance insisted, and he wasn’t here for an argument about it, it was just _true_ , and he had long since accepted it. He geared himself up to finally say it, to finally take this risk. “Because my friend, Keith, is – he’s a prince. _Prince_ Keith,” he winced.

Coran took a moment to look absolutely winded before finally finding his voice, weak with a wheeze. “ _Prince Keith_ ,” he echoed. “Lance… how…?”

“It’s not like I,” Lance sighed, tried to get his head right. “I didn’t _know_ he was a prince when I met him. We were like, _eight_. We played in the street together and decided we were friends and _then_ I found out he was a prince and I still barely knew what that meant. And I must be really stupid because I feel like I’m only just starting to really, _really_ get how… dangerous it is for us to be friends. I mean, people are always talking about him and criticizing him for something,” Lance said in an annoyed sigh to a still shocked Coran. “And it wasn’t so bad when they were just gossiping about the half-human thing. That doesn’t bother Keith anymore. But now with all these rumors about Keith ‘ _consorting with a peasant,_ ’ I just. I’m worried. Especially since _I’m_ ,” he sighed, braced himself and let it go. “The peasant.”

_“_ Lance. _What?”_

“I’m telling you it’s me!” Lance groaned, face in his hands as he groaned and groaned some more. “I’m the nameless nobody everyone’s talking about seeing Prince Keith with!”

Coran took so long to respond that Lance risked a peak through his fingers to see Coran visibly struggling with the words on the tip of his tongue. He quirked a brow. “Lance, _have_ you been… _consorting_ with the _prince of Daibazaal?!_ ”

Lance blinked, mouth opening and closing as it finally struck him what he’d been leading Coran to believe. “ _No!_ No, not – _consorting!_ There’s no consorting, it’s not – it’s not like that,” he insisted, heart beating halfway through his chest. “But I’m getting really worried. I haven’t seen him in weeks now and I’m worried that I got him into trouble or something, like. What if they won’t let him leave the palace anymore? What if they come for me next?” Lance’s heart nearly stopped as he considered a much worse possibility. “What if I don’t ever get to see him again?”

“Alright, we’ll be coming back to _that_ ,” Coran said brows furrowing. “But for now, I think you’re putting a lot of stress on yourself about something you can’t do anything about.”

“But–”

“With all these rumors going around, I’m sure it’s as simple as Princess Krolia making him lay low until they die down. It’s not like this hasn’t happened before, you know that. I remember when Princess Krolia fell in love with Keith’s father. And it’s been happening for decophebes before her. This isn’t exactly a new thing – royals and civilians falling in love–”

“That’s not what this is.”

Coran seemed taken aback at that, by how _harshly_ Lance had interrupted and he hadn’t meant to sound so– “Well,” Coran started carefully, knowingly, like his parents did when they were trying to convince Lance of something he already knew. “That’s what it _sounds_ like.”

“Well then you’re hearing it wrong,” Lance said, arms crossing as he glared down at the counter top. “You know, it’s bad enough that Keith spends any time with me at all – I’m a poor, human peasant. That’s like. The worst peasant to _be_. I’d be, like, way out of my place to feel anything else.”

“Lance,” Coran said, unmoved, unimpressed. Lance risked a glance and was met with just how unmoved and unimpressed Coran looked and–

“Okay, _fine_ , so I think he’s gorgeous and funny and pretty and stuff!” Lance hissed through narrowed eyes he could see Coran trying not to laugh at. “I think about him all the time and sometimes I fall asleep in my bed facing the castle so I can pretend like he’s closer! There! Are you happy?!”

“I don’t think you want me to be honest about that,” Coran admitted, hand over his mouth.

“Thanks, I’m only confessing that I’m in love with a _prince_ , thanks.” It embarrassed Lance enough to have him slinking down behind the counter, groaning into his hands. He’d never said it out loud before, barely even let himself think it, but there it was, out in the open, unable to take back, and he was still trying to figure out exactly what the earthquake in his chest meant. “We’re not in love,” he said, folding his arms atop his knees. “He’s not – he’s not in love with _me_. Maybe this scandal thing is actually for the best. Maybe Keith will have to stay away from me and meet someone else royal. And I’ll move on and stop hoping for things I can’t have like an idiot.”

Coran sighed long and low from over the counter. “Do you really believe that?”

Lance shrugged, head bowing lower over his knees. “I don’t know.”

“Lance, I think you should talk to Keith about this.”

“Oh, okay, well _no_ , next question.” This talk was supposed to make him feel _better_. Currently, he’d rather be invisible, or anywhere else than here right now. Anyone else besides himself.

He heard as Coran walked around the counter, felt him sit himself down right beside him, their arms just about touching as he leaned back with Lance against the glass behind them. “I know this is a tough thing to talk about. Thinking about how things could change. How something like this could go either really well, or really poorly.”

Lance hesitated. “Yeah.” Hearing Coran speak like this was always jarring – always an unpleasant reminder of the person Coran truly was underneath all the zaniness. The person he’d left back on Altea when he, the kindest, most selfless man Lance had ever known, lost everything he loved. Who desperately didn’t want to relive it, so Lance never asked how.

“It’s your choice to make,” Coran continued with a sad sort of smile, eyes distant and unfocused, stuck somewhere in the past. “The future is uncertain, but it can still be what you make it. I don’t think you really want things with Keith to turn out as badly as you’re saying you do. I think some honesty would do you both a whole lot of good. You should let yourself know as much love as you can.”

As the days had passed, he couldn’t forget Coran’s words, growing louder and louder in his head as if he were there shouting them into his ears. His heart beat faster every time he thought about how it would even _go_ if he said anything to Keith. If he were honest. If he could get through it without catastrophizing.

He was huddled in his bed, curled up in a ball, trying to force his own eyes to stay _closed_ , but he was wide awake, eyes gazing out his window, locked onto the castle like he was trained to do it.

He’d been thinking a lot about how the love of his family was all the love he had ever known, and how much he cherished it. Loving Keith didn’t quite feel like that. It didn’t quite feel better, but it screamed so much louder. Was far more frenzied, and _desperate_ , and–

Inappropriate. Ill-advised. _Doomed_. Delusional.

_Laughable_ –

A light tapping sounded against his window and he nearly swallowed his tongue. He knew who it was before he’d even fully flung his blankets off himself – it had only ever been one person, but he couldn’t move fast enough, couldn’t see those eyes and that smile fast enough.

“ _Lance!_ ” Keith whisper-yelled at the sight of him, relieved smile taking up half his face and Lance couldn’t stop himself, climbing the threshold and effectively throwing himself out of his window, snagging Keith in his arms on the way down. He felt Keith laugh into his shoulder.

Keith rushed to gather himself, pulling Lance up to his feet. “We can do this later,” he managed in an unconvincing huff. “Let’s go, before somebody sees us,” he hissed, and he grabbed Lance’s hand, rushing them into the woods while Lance told himself it was a stupid thing to get flustered over.

Lance was on him again the second Keith let them stop, arms squeezed so tight around Keith’s middle it almost hurt.

Keith didn’t much seem to mind it. “I’m sorry I’ve been gone so long. Thought it might be smart to let everything die down,” he said, wheezed into Lance’s shoulder, arms locked just as tight around Lance’s neck. “Allura said that if I didn’t, then it might put you in danger and I got scared someone would find out about you and that it’d put your _family_ in danger, and I know now that I’ve been such a selfish asshole, and I’m sorry–”

“Shut up,” Lance murmured, head buried into Keith’s shoulder, too. “Just glad you’re okay.”

Keith went silent. Lance’s thoughts started to spin.

If this went badly, this could be the last time he ever got to touch Keith. The last time he ever got to _see_ him this close, if he ever saw him again at all, and he knew he should let go – that this contact alone was probably leagues more inappropriate than anything he would ever feel again, but he didn’t want to have to face this. Face _Keith_. Face the stupid, crazy thing he was about to do.

“Are you okay?” Keith asked, voice concerned into his shoulder after what must have been dobashes of Lance procrastinating. He braced himself as Keith pried free of Lance’s grip, holding him steady by the shoulder, indigo eyes darting back and forth between baby blue. “Were you really that worried?” he asked, the question tinged with a nervous laugh, and.

_God_.

It wasn’t the first time Lance had the thought that Keith was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, but it was certainly the most painful. Even so, he wanted to commit it all to memory – the perfect slope of Keith’s straight nose, the perfect lines of his brows as they furrowed over endless, stormy galaxy eyes. The way his ears never quite laid flat beneath his hair, the dimple that formed in his chin when he pouted. The fullness of those unattainable lips, and the perfect white teeth chewing on them. The way he blushed purple the longer Lance stared and didn’t say anything.

He’d remember this. He’d remember this moment, the breeze, and the trees all around them as their only witnesses for the rest of his life, he knew it. He knew he would never meet someone like Keith again. He wondered if his heart had known that when they met.

“I have to admit something to you,” Lance blurted, voice braver than he truly felt as he looked Keith head on. “And it might ruin things, or you might hate me, but I think for once, I’d just rather be honest with you.”

Keith blinked, brows furrowing over dark eyes.

Lance had to look away, eyes dropping to the ground and he told himself that was okay and that he could do this, just like he practiced. “Okay. I’m going to be honest, and to start, I’d like to admit that I wanna die? Okay, not funny,” Lance backtracked at Keith’s blank expression. “Time for some honesty. Here it comes–”

“Okay,” Keith interrupted, annoyed like he got when he didn’t understand something and Lance groaned, slapping his hands over his face and willing himself to sink into the ground. “Calm down,” Keith continued, voice softer and calmer than Lance could ever remember hearing it. Hands closing around Lance’s wrists, Keith pulled Lance’s hands away and met him with those eyes as if he knew the spell they put him under. “Just get it out. What are you trying to say?”

Keith’s hands around his wrists were the only things he could _feel_ , and his eyes were like the tides pulling him in, and in, and _in_ , and– “I know I’m just a human, and that we should have never even been friends, and that if anyone found out about this, you’d be in… _so_ much trouble. And who even knows what would happen to _me_ ,” Lance said, nervous and terrified. Keith only looked more and more confused. Lance told himself to be brave. “But. Okay, you know how you always get when you talk about what it’d be like to get off Daibazaal someday? And you get all space-y about it because you’re trying to understand how it would work and what it’d be like and what amazing, fantastic things could happen if you could just do it?”

“I’m that obvious about it?” Keith murmured, eyes narrowed.

Lance swallowed. “Yeah.” _It’s adorable_. “And I guess what I’m getting at is that’s how I feel about you,” he breathed. He took a moment to truly look at Keith as he said it, the way galaxy eyes widened and thick, furrowed brows shot up under his hair, and Lance felt so jittery just beneath his skin, and Keith was still holding his wrists– “It’s like I look at you, or think about you, and then I’m imagining this… stupid other world where I’m not so far beneath you and it’s okay to feel like this, and then I spend the rest of the time trying to force it out of my system but it won’t _leave_ because whenever I’m back around you, it’s like I’m in your orbit and I feel like that even when I’m _not_ around you, even when we’re across the kingdom from each other and – holy shit, you’re my best friend and it’s so crazy that you even still talk to me, but I just. Really like you and I thought – maybe if I finally told you… I could get over it.”

It felt like an empty cavern in his chest filled with only thunder now that he’d gotten it all out and Keith only stared back at him like _that_ , and. In the silence that followed, he frantically considered all the ways he could convince Keith that he hadn’t just said any of that.

Then Keith beamed, teeth on full display like Lance had just given him the world and he drew closer, hands finally releasing Lance’s wrists to latch onto his shoulders and.

Lance felt a panic unlike any he’d ever _felt_ before at _that_ reaction, but then Keith was looping his arms around Lance’s shoulders and fiddling with the hair at the nape of his neck and Lance _froze_.

Impulsively, like he did everything, Keith squeezed his eyes shut and leaned up to push his lips onto Lance’s, soft and questioning with plenty of room to push away. But Lance felt like he’d come alive, kissing Keith back like he’d dreamed he could for years now, hands reaching up to Keith’s face, just to _hold_ him, just to feel all he could before it had to end. He felt Keith smile and pulled away so he could see it.

It was a smile Lance couldn’t remember seeing much before, if ever at all. Unabashedly happy, almost giddy as he bit down on his lip, eyes darting back and forth between Lance’s eyes and the ground. It wasn’t the first time Lance had the thought that Keith was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. It certainly wouldn’t be the last.

“You’re okay with this?” Lance asked with tingling lips and a wobbly smile. “With me feeling like this for you?”

“Stupid,” Keith rolled his eyes and leaned back up, lips connecting with Lance’s, too quick for Lance to respond properly before he was leaning back away, eyes like a magnetic pull. “I always hoped you did.”

*

Lately, Keith dreamed in color. He used to dream like normal, used to dream about the events of the day in weird, distorted reenactments, but lately, it was color. Just color and almost nothing else.

It had started his first night on Altea. His dreams were chaos that night, starting off like normal – starting off with a space trip much bumpier and quicker paced than it had been in real time. Dialogue was muted, and reaction times were slower, and the part where he realized he may never see Lance again was the last thing that made sense, then it was like his mind turned _blue_.

Blue like sadness. Blue like loss and isolation and fear. And it felt like it stayed that way for a long time in his mind, swirling in varying shades of deep, dark, endless blue and then–

And then the blue lightened and grew warmer until it was blue like the dsvelde stalks he and Allura used to play in just outside the palace walls and get into trouble for, and then–

Blue, almost like Allura’s eyes – the ones he used to wish he had himself if it meant he’d look less human, and then blue like the stars in the north quadrant from Keith’s bedroom window where he stared when he wondered what it’d be like to get off Daibazaal someday, and _blue_ like the color of the oceans the mer lived in when their parents had taken him and Allura to meet the dignitaries there…. Then he knew what he was really dreaming about because all those blues were close, but it wasn’t quite right.

It was blue like Lance’s eyes – his favorite blue.

Over the years, he’d dreamed in other colors, reds and greens, plenty of purples, but usually blue. Usually Lance Blue.

And he was dreaming in blue again, when he was startled awake by servants bustling into his room and trying to pull him out of his bed. Kosmo growled, planting himself over his owner and threatening to bite their reaching hands until one of them, seeming nervous to do it, explained that Lotor had given them orders.

He learned, as two servants rushed him into his bathroom to brush his teeth and wash his face that there was to be a tournament later that day.

He was further told, as they combed out and styled his long locks into a straight, even braid down his back, that it would be an archery tournament meant to help the king find new bodyguards, but not for himself.

For Keith and Allura, rather.

The servants tried to stuff him into the formal Galra wear despite his stubbornness. They told him, as they did up the zipper of his bodysuit, that the prize for the winner was a kiss from the princess – that Allura would have to kiss whoever was going to _replace Shiro_ and he _knew_ without a doubt that this was what they’d been waiting for with bated breath.

This was Lotor making his move. This was Lotor making a show of punishing them.

 

If he had to really think about it, Lance would say he'd only had about five real witch potions in his whole life.

He had his first when he was about six and had to get his tonsils removed. His parents had gone to Coran for a potion to numb his pain during the weeks he recovered. A few years later, his appendix nearly ruptured inside him and his mother had gotten a potion from Coran to essentially freeze Lance until they could get a doctor involved.

The third time was an accident. Clumsy teen that he was, he’d been handling potions for Coran while he was across town visiting a client and he’d accidentally spilled it all over himself and turned his skin hard as stone until Coran came back to set him right. The fourth to numb the pain inside after his family’s death. There were only so many ways to tell a sixteen-year-old that it would hurt less with time and Coran didn’t know what else to do for him.

It was a testament to how much Lance trusted Coran, really, that the fifth time – this morning – when he saw Coran stepping into their camp with a vile of potion, he’d barely let Coran get more than a couple sentence out about what it even _was_ before he plucked it from his outstretched hand and downed the entire thing in one swallow. Or maybe, as Hunk would point out in the moments that followed, it was a testament to his own stupidity, or at least Lance _thought_ he pointed out.

He could barely even hear the comment over the buzzing in his ears.

The aftertaste clung to his tongue, made him think of fresh Altean juniberries all the way down his throat and into his chest where it seemed to _stop_ a moment, fizzle within him and rumble a bit, then it _expanded_ throughout the rest of his body like a spark following a fuse. He felt almost unreal, like he was in sharper focus than everything else around him, like he was in technicolor while everything else was muted. And then he felt like he was _stronger_ somehow – like his skin was made of metal and the muscle underneath made of stone. He felt like his brain was hurdling into overdrive and he just wanted to _move_ , expend some energy – he’d never felt more resilient in all his _life_ and he–

A large hand came up, lightly patting against his face, making Lance flinch. “Is he… okay?” Hunk murmured.

“ _Yes_ ,” Lance snapped, dodging back a step. He rubbed at his cheek.

Coran stepped between them, guarding Lance like he was a ticking time bomb. “He’s fine, Hunk,” he insisted, though he looked a bit amused the longer he stared Lance in the eye, and – did he _know_ somehow that Lance was trying to count all the hairs in his mustache?

He knew the conversation that followed was probably important and most likely concerned him, judging by the way Coran kept leering at him like he couldn’t be real, but for some reason he just couldn’t make himself worry.

He didn’t _feel_ like worrying – things were awesome right now. Hunk had finished his new bow and arrow set last night and it was leagues stronger than his old one. It had more special arrows – more arrows _period_ , better yet, and they could do more than just pierce skin or electrocute. Some of them could _detonate_ , and Lance wanted so badly to test it out, but Hunk kept telling him to wait until they were at the tournament to save Keith and Princess Allura rather than surrounded by trees they lived among.

He couldn’t keep still, couldn’t stop pacing as Coran and Hunk talked about whatever it was they had to talk about when Lance felt so untouchable – like he could touch the _sky_.

“Hey, can we go? Let’s _go,_ ” he said as he ran – _was he running?_ – through the forest.

“Coran, what the hell did he drink?”

“You don’t need to worry, it's just a luck potion. To hone his reflexes, boost his agility, put him at the top of his game – that kind of thing,” Coran explained. Lance could hear the both of them running to keep up. “Granted, he probably shouldn't have gulped the whole thing like that–”

“Yeah, probably!” Hunk snapped back. “This idiot better not drop dead…”

Lance scoffed, and he knew somehow that he was too far ahead to have been able to hear that if not for the liquid magic was pumping through his veins. He felt too electric to be an idiot, or to _ever_ drop dead. He felt like he could feel everything all at once, like he was immersed inside all his senses.

He ran uninterrupted on what felt like an endless reserve of energy, unconcerned with where he was going, but he just knew somehow that he’d wind up in the right place. He was right, winding up right at the edge of the woods of Sector Two. He decided to finally stop and wait. Hunk would be mad if Lance went on without them any further, especially into a crowd of people.

As he waited, he looked out into the crowd, scoping. He hadn’t been in Sector Two much, but all the same he’d never realized this field was so _big_ , but it looked like half of all of Daibazaal had made it out. The grounds were a wide field full of tents and merchant tables no one from Sector Two could afford to buy food from. Some people were sitting in the grass along the sides or in the trees across the field, and it was kind of chaos, seeing so many kids running around where there was about to be an archery tournament. Chaos in the sense Lance used to think of when he’d have to help finagle his own rowdy younger siblings into a gaggle to keep them from running off and wrecking their own havoc.

His squinted, trying to see the targets at the end of the field. Most of the contestants appeared to be Galra soldiers. Their big, burly statures - tall and domineering - certainly made for a good buffer to anyone else wanting to enter the tournament, and right among them, Lance could see Lotor’s personal generals, seemingly wishing them luck. The pink one was sneering like she always did. Lance tried not to outwardly grimace. He’d always hated the generals.

“ _Shit_ , Lance!”

Lance jumped, turning with the hand gripping at his shoulder. “What?!” he snapped.

“Fuck, don't just run off like that! You’re giving me a fucking heart attack, here!” Hunk berated, exasperated. “You’re not wearing your mask or your–”

“ _Lance!_ ” Coran gasped, bringing up the rear. He skid to a stop beside Hunk, pulled him back into the woods by his arms. “Slow down or you won’t have any of this energy left for the tournament!” he exclaimed, checking him over. “How are you feeling? Do you need more–?”

_“Do not give him anymore.”_

Coran glared at Hunk for what Lance was certain had to be the first time. “Well, he can’t go out there defenseless! He needs something! He has to win!”

“Coran, your potion’s gonna get him _killed–!_ ”

“It will _not_ , that’s the entire _point_ of the _potion–!_ ”

Lance blamed the potion for barely being able to focus on anything they were saying when all he wanted to do was stop standing here. He sighed, blank stare shifting back and forth between the two of them, _trying_ to absorb it, but right between Hunk and Coran’s angry faces, just off in the distance, something caught his gaze.

There in the crowd, in the middle of the field… sitting sectioned off in the center of the field…

“Keith,” he whispered. He almost couldn’t believe it.

“What?” Hunk murmured, whipping around to try to see for himself. Coran did the same as Lance took a cautious step forward, right between them because – _fuck_ , there was Keith. After all these years, he was looking right at him.

He felt indestructible, like he could take down a tank – like he _was_ a tank and suddenly he couldn’t keep still, couldn’t make his thoughts form any other words, because there was the love of his life, sitting up in a small, isolated, walled-off platform next to Princess Allura and who Lance knew to be their body guard. He was nearly hunched over in his seat, with that scowl on his face and he looked pensive and angry and stressed and _Keith_ –

“Whoa there, lover boy,” Hunk snapped, reached out once again to hold him back. “Hood and mask – _now!_ ” he ordered, waiting impatiently as Lance groaned and did as he was told. He snapped his fingers in front of Lance’s face, shook him roughly by the shoulders before he could try to slip off again, tried to make him focus on him but his gaze kept wandering across the field to _Keith_ , and– “Listen to me – you can't just go wandering out there – tell him, Coran.”

“ _Actually_ –”

“Oh my god.”

“I’m just saying!” Coran snapped. “The potion I made is foolproof! He won’t get hurt like this. All odds will be in his favor until it wears off, so why _can’t_ he go and–”

“Because he’s a lovestruck idiot!” Hunk hissed back. “And maybe he won’t get killed, but he could get _caught_ and–”

“I _just said_ –” Coran started back, face set in a frustrated glare as he proceeded to stress, again, that Lance was the luckiest he’d ever been, though Lance was past the point of listening. He felt like liquid fire, shrinking back and away, ambling off without ever really deciding to, legs calling the shots almost entirely without the rest of him because his brain was stuck, _jammed_ on that thing about Keith being in the same place as he was – not even fifty feet _away_ and–

He was walking to Keith, he was going to look him in the face and look in his eyes and see his lips and he was going to speak to him and hear his voice and maybe even see his smile and–

God, it was like everything outside his tunnel vision had turned to clouds. He felt like every step represented a year they’d been apart, felt like he couldn’t close the distance fast enough, felt like he was running out of time, felt like if he blinked he might wake up in his hammock and none of it was even real–

“I hope I win that kiss.”

It took the words leaving his own lips for him to even realize where he _was_ – separated from Keith only by the wooden barrier surrounding the royal platform and of course, Keith wasn’t even _looking_ at him when he said it, hunched over with his head resting against his hands over his knees. Though he looked particularly frozen at Lance’s words – Lance’s stupid, thoughtless _words_ – and he didn’t even know what possessed him to _say_ it, but he cleared his throat, deactivated his mask, and tried to come up with some kind of apology, but Keith sighed.

Annoyed, he lifted his head off his arms, eyes still glaring frustratingly down on his knees, and he groused, in that _voice_ – god, the one that usually meant a reckoning was coming, but if he would just _look up_ – “Dude, the kiss is with _Allura–_ ” he drawled, and _finally_ –

Finally, he looked up and completely _froze_. And Lance knew he froze, too – could feel the absolutely _stupid_ look on his face as he tried to take it all _in_ , memorize and absorb it all – understand all the ways Keith had grown and changed.

He’d grown his hair out, braided straight and even down to the middle of his back and his bangs were still too long. They hung over into his eyes and down over his ears, and Lance just wanted to push it all back with his fingers. And he was _bigger_ , with a steady jawline and slimmer cheeks and filled-out shoulders, he wasn’t a teenager anymore, but a _man_ and–

“ _Lance_ ,” he whispered, gutted and raw like he couldn’t believe it. He wiped at his eyes, and those lips Lance cherished more than _air_ parted in a watery laugh as he looked back at him like he couldn’t be _real,_ with those eyes – swirling pools of nighttime sky Lance loved so much.

He huffed out his own watery laugh. “Hi,” Lance managed back.

_“Get your mask back up!”_

“Huh?” A hand gripped his shoulder, and suddenly, he was being dragged forcefully away from Keith, and _no_. “Hey, wait!”

“ _Now!_ ” Hunk barked again with a glare until Lance activated his mask again, though he was distracted, stuck staring back over his shoulder. He couldn’t take his eyes off Keith who was looking after him with an expression Lance didn’t think he’d ever seen on him before. Hunk sighed, dragging him over to the lineup. “Are you fucking kidding me, dude?”

“Sorry,” Lance said back. He’d never admit out loud that he was whining but he could see on Hunk's face that least it was working. “I had to see him.”

Hunk sighed back, face entirely hidden by his own mask, but Lance knew the exact expression he was making. “I know just. I know you've got luck running through your veins but try to focus okay. Something’s weird. Lotor isn't even here.”

“He's _not?_ ” Lance took another look around the field, and saw, near the target line, a large propped up seated podium, even bigger than the one Keith was sitting in. And just as Hunk said there was no Lotor, only the generals. “Wait,” Lance murmured, with a confused look back over toward Keith. “Why are Keith and Allura just sitting out in the open like that with only their guard? Why aren’t they over _there_ with the generals? Why isn’t Lotor here?”

“Look, don't worry about that,” Hunk advised, though Lance could tell by the look in his eyes that he’d been wondering the same things. “Just focus on winning. Lotor not being here makes things easier. Maybe Coran and I can get to Keith and the princess?”

Lance nodded with a look over to Keith who seemed to be having an equally serious conversation with the princess and their guard. “Okay,” he decided hesitantly. Hunk made to leave.

From there, the tournament seemed to pass in a blur of confusion and distraction. Lance couldn’t keep his eyes off Keith and Allura for longer than a dobash at a time. He couldn’t find Hunk or Coran in the crowd anymore, but he managed to spot  
Pidge of all people, and that only enhanced his sense of dread. He was only able to pay attention to the task at hand long enough to notice when the line moved.

Suddenly, it was his turn and suddenly, everything was back in clear focus. The field was quieter now, and he was certain he wasn’t making it up. Somehow, he knew that it was quiet now because of _him_ , that everyone was watching _him_ , and he _felt_ it more certain than he’d felt anything in a long time that his mask and suit weren’t hiding a goddamn thing – that there was no doubt he was the Blue Bandit.

The Galra generals were staring right at him.

He forced his eyes forward onto the target he was supposed to hit and shook out his fingers. He didn’t know what was going to happen after this, and he felt ridiculous that it was only now he was realizing that they didn’t have a _plan_ , but he lined up his shot, felt the adrenaline in his bones and with a flick of his fingers, he let go, watched his arrow go sailing….

_Bullseye_.

He looked around, ready to shoot the rest of his arrows. A few cheers broke out, but he could barely hear them, lost his train of thought entirely when he risked a glance over to Keith only to find him _gone_. Princess Allura and their guard too, and he still didn’t see Hunk or Coran anywhere–

He turned back to see the generals approaching him, eyes so trained on him, and he wondered if they even knew Keith and Allura were suddenly gone or – or if they were the _reason_ for it–

“So,” the pink one, Ezor, started out, voice threateningly casual as she came to a stop right before him. “Who do you think we have here?” she asked, with a delightedly evil smile around at the other generals.

Lance glared behind his mask, stood firm with his bow gripped tight in his hand, and tried to come up with something to say to that, but Zethrid beat him to it.

“Couldn’t be the Blue Bandit,” she said with the same false sincerity Ezor had.

Lance started to reach back for an arrow without alerting them as they closed in around him. He still couldn’t see Hunk or Coran or anyone he needed, but he still felt lucky. He could do this alone if he needed to.

“No,” Axca chimed in, though she never seemed to have as much fun as the others. She stared straight at him with a face so blank Lance couldn’t read it, but she was never above the cat-and-mouse game. “The Blue Bandit wouldn’t possibly be stupid enough to walk right into this.”

Ezor shrugged in response. “Eh,” she said, reaching into the holsters at her sides and retrieving two large knives. Lance was certain that everyone watching must have all gasped at once. “He’s fallen for stupider.” She reared back.

Lance moved quickly, arm bending back over his shoulder for an arrow, fingertips just brushing the metal end of one as he flinched back, tried to dodge Ezor’s swing, but then–

There was a loud _clang_ , metal against metal, blade against blade and Ezor’s swing was stopped midair by _Keith_ , Lance realized, chest surging with shock and relief and love and _fascination_ and–

Keith grunted, heaving his blade against Ezor’s until she fell back, and he stood straighter, breathing hard and glaring Ezor down. “Where's Lotor?” he demanded.

“Well, if we didn’t think he was the Blue Bandit before,” Axca drawled, purple eyes darting back and forth between Lance and Keith who was defending him.

Ezor sneered again, looked down at Keith like he was nothing. “I think you mean _King_ Lotor, half-breed,” she said with a laugh. “And he’s got better things to do. Figured we could handle luring out the Blue Bandit and tending to the royal _brats_ ,” she spat, and with that she attacked, swinging her knives back down.

Keith blocked again, grunting at the force of her swing, and she swung down again with her other knife, but this time Lance used the brunt of his bow to block, pushing Keith back behind him with his hand, but Keith pushed back. He took another swing for Ezor, but she ducked, falling into a crouch and flipping backward, far back enough that it gave Lance an opening. He readied an arrow, let it fly, and the other generals scattered as she dodged, sprinting to the side, trying to get behind them.

Without even thinking, Keith stationed himself against Lance’s back and they steadied themselves together to fend her off. Keith and Lance shared a look, jumping back to back to fend her off. Lance tried to find Hunk between swings, between hits, but he couldn’t focus on anything other than the screaming and running of frantic civilians trying to get to safety and he _hoped_ –

Ezor attacked viciously, swinging down toward Keith’s head just as he blocked, and Lance jumped into action, turning to charge at her with the sharp edge of his bow. Keith took it from there when she shrank back, tried to attack again. He sliced her across the chest plate with his sword and Lance knew this was the _worst_ time to think about how good they were at this together – at keeping each other safe and having each other’s backs even after so much time apart. He knew it was the _worst_ time to think about how they didn’t even know they could _do_ this, had never done it before, but they were doing it anyway, doing it perfectly now.

This was the worst time to think about how their entire lives together and all the years apart somehow added up to this, the two of them fighting for their lives against one of the most agile soldiers Lance had ever fought. About how Lance wasn’t worried for them one bit, and how Keith didn’t seem to be either, because no matter what, they always made such a good _team_. Lance never wanted to apart from Keith again.

This was the worst time to try saying any of this, but then again, Lance had downed an entire bottle of luck potion and had yet to come across a single thing that made him regret it.

“So, hey Keith, what are you doing after this?”

“What?” Keith squawked, mid-swing, so startled, he nearly lost his balance. “What – are you fucking serious?”

Lance swung his bow again, while Ezor reeled back, looking confused. “Yeah, this is crucial, what’s your answer?”

Keith gaped. “I don’t know! I imagine I’m gonna be a little busy for a while after this!”

“Well, that sucks, wanted to ask you out,” Lance shrugged, ducking as Ezor swiped her blade at his head.

There was a lull in the fighting so obvious, the three of them had all but stopped, and then, to Lance’s surprise, Keith laughed – a choked-up huff like he just couldn’t help himself. “ _Lance, I swear to god_.”

“Well, what are you doing _after_ that then?” he asked as Ezor’s jaw dropped. “Because I was thinking–”

“Are you kidding me?” she demanded, somewhere between confused and exhausted, most importantly, distracted.

Lance was beginning to realize that the one setback so far to this luck potion was that it _continually_ kept him from really grasping that they were in the middle of something here.

Thanks to Lance’s antics, Keith looked like he had momentarily forgotten all about her, but then snapped out of it in the next. Thinking quickly, he swung his blade right over the slash through her chest plate he had made earlier, taking advantage of Lance’s distraction to take her down altogether. She gasped in surprise, falling back, clasping her hands over her wound as it started to bleed. Breathing hard, she still had it in her to fix them with a glare, determined and deadly. “This _isn’t_ over half-breed,” she rasped out, and with all her strength she broke into a weak run, headed for the edge of the woods where a small fleet of Galra ships waited.

Lance watched in shock as she ran away, reached back for an arrow and lined up a shot. “ _Damn_ , Kogane,” he whistled, pulling his arrow back and–

“Leave her,” Keith decided, stopping Lance’s arm. “If she goes back to Lotor, then it’s as a message,” he explained. He pulled Lance away by the hand, broke into a run. He sounded normal, but Lance could see his cheeks flushing purple because he was _embarrassed_ , or at the very least exhausted, and it was probably that one, Lance told the luck potion in his veins. Not necessarily because his flirting had worked so well, it had distracted Keith mid-battle. “I have to find Allura and Shiro,” Keith huffed, and Lance told himself to focus.

Chaos surrounded them, people running frantically every which way trying to figure out where to go, trying to get away from the attacking Galra soldiers and find all their loved ones. A lot of them were running for the woods.

He could see Coran rushing all around, gathering up lost children and using his magic to deter soldiers from crushing them with Shay and Pidge among them. He scanned the crowd for Hunk as they ran but still couldn’t find him.

“There!” Keith huffed back, pointing up just ahead to the right. Sure enough, Princess Allura and Shiro the bodyguard were fighting nonstop against a handful of soldiers atop the box seats, though two looked to be taken care of, sprawled across the ground. Fighting alongside them was none other than Hunk, who was in the middle of taking down another one of the generals.

Keith took off, dropping Lance’s hand and running up the box seats until he reached Allura and Shiro, just in time to swing his blade down on Axca, who just narrowly managed to roll out of the way. Lance saw Zethrid then, appearing as if from thin air and running up from the rear toward Keith. Lance wasted no time aiming an arrow and shooting it right into Zethrid’s back.

Keith turned when she yelled in shock, swinging his blade at her out of instinct before he noticed she was falling, staggering backward over the railing of the box seats and toppling over the edge, landing in a heap and lying still across the ground.

Then Keith yelled, having also lost his balance after swinging his blade too hard without ever hitting his target. Lance moved without thinking, running to close the distance between himself and Keith who tried to catch himself on the railing, but it was too low. He was losing his balance over the edge, he was falling–

“Gotcha!” Lance grunted, Keith landing in his arms just in time. Keith looked around, shocked and confused for a second before his eyes settled on Lance like he couldn’t be real.

“Jesus, Lance,” he huffed, amused with eyes stuck to him like magnets and – Lance was reeling a bit at the fact that after all these years he had Keith back in his arms like he belonged there. Keith raised his arms, letting them rest around Lance’s shoulders and Lance couldn’t even feel his skin through his suit but he felt like everywhere they touched was slowly engulfing in flame.

Lance cleared his throat, and his mouth snapped open before he could even think to stop it. “Still falling for me, I see–”

Keith snorted. “That’s it,” he decided with that _grin_ that Lance knew in his heart meant that Keith had never felt more endeared in his entire life as he leaned up and kissed him. Pressed their lips together like he was dying for it, like he was sealing a deal, and he kept grinning against Lance’s lips like he couldn’t contain it, like this was the only place he wanted to _be,_ and Lance knew they were kind of in the middle of something here, but he was melting, melting–

Keith pulled away, face burning purple in embarrassment and _God, Lance had missed him so much–_ he jumped down, swaying on his feet a bit and Lance just wanted to scoop him right back up. He cleared his throat, tugged at his braid, and took off in the opposite direction, charging to join Allura and Shiro again.

Lance could see Hunk, having just knocked out a soldier with his gauntlets. He turned to him, wiggling his eyebrows and winking like he’d seen everything. Lance felt his own face heating up as he jumped into fighting beside Hunk, though his eyes kept wandering back to the line of Galra ships from earlier. Ezor had already taken one and she’d be going back to Lotor. They needed to get out of here and they’d need a ship to do it.

 

“Just head to the next sector,” Coran instructed. Shiro looked up at Coran over his shoulder before nodding and turning their stolen ship toward Sector Three. Coran was the most powerful sorcerer anyone knew, with the biggest heart. If he said he had a safe place for them, then they trusted him.

The ship was silent at first, as packed as it was with Shay's kids and innocent people who couldn’t run far enough. All the adrenaline had died down and all that was left was _shock_ in the wake of everything that had just happened. The silence was loud.

Until finally Pidge spoke up. “What the hell was _that?_ ” she asked. She looked around from face to face, waiting for an answer, but no one answered back. She sighed, tried again. “Lance?” she tried.

Lance blinked in surprise, nearly slid down the side of the cabin wall he was leaning against, he was so caught off guard. “What – _me?_ ” he murmured. He looked across the small ship at Hunk who looked just as lost and tired as he felt now that the luck potion was wearing off and slowing him down. Keith was near the back with his arms crossed and his eyes on the floor. He looked just about ready to pass out now that there was no adrenaline keeping him moving. “I don’t know,” Lance admitted. “I mean, I knew _I_ could be attacked, but I don’t know why the soldiers went so crazy.”

“Unfortunately,” Allura chimed in with a heavy sigh, “this was about us coming back. It was even more about us than it was about catching you,” she frowned, sad eyes down on the floor.

Shiro glanced back at her over his shoulder with concerned eyes. “Allura, you don’t have to–”

“I’m fine. They should know,” Allura said gently. Her eyes rolled over to Pidge, sitting patient in the floor with Shay and the other orphans. “We promised. So, here it is,” she started. With folded arms and clenched hands, she spoke down to the floor and said the most shocking thing that Lance had heard today. “Voltron is coming back.”

“What?” Lance gasped, just one in a roomful.

“That’s why we’re back,” Allura continued, over the gasps around the ship. “Because they’re on their way back. We don’t know how long it will take them to get here, but at least the war is over and they can save Daibazaal. Lotor knows this too and we think he’s panicking. And this was just,” Allura paused, took a deep breath that came back out shaky. Her hands clenched tighter. “This was Lotor trying to get revenge on us,” she admitted. “He didn’t care that you were all bystanders.”

Hunk shook his head, confused. “What does that mean?”

“It means Lotor just tried to have us _killed_ ,” Keith answered. “Specifically Allura, Shiro and me, but he didn’t mind casualties, too.”

“Keith,” Shiro warned.

“He _did_ ,” Keith insisted, heavy eyes still on the ground and he looked pained to have to admit it. “He’s wanted to punish the three of us since we came back,” he said with a pointed look at Allura. “The whole tournament was just about Lotor _torturing_ us – making us watch a competition where the winner was gonna _replace_ Shiro just to make _you_ pay for daring to marry him? Just to make _Shiro_ pay for defying his orders years ago?” he listed, shaking his head. “And he didn’t even try to kill us _himself_ , he just made the generals do it like a coward,” he said quietly, back to folding in on himself.

“ _Yeah_ ,” Allura agreed, sounding crestfallen and defeated and hurt above it all, back staring down at the ground. With a sigh she lifted her gaze and forced a smile, pinched and taut but determined. “So in light of what happened today,” she started, confident and regal like the Allura Lance remembered. “I don’t think we have time to wait for Voltron to get back. This isn’t going to happen again,” she promised the room. “When we land, Shiro, Keith, and I will come up with a plan while you all rest up and we’ll… we’ll fix this.”

“We trust you,” Pidge said without even a second to process. She looked around the ship, then back to Allura, smile so reassuring it was contagious.

Lance couldn’t help but think that it was because Pidge hadn’t _been_ there when everything had gone _sideways_ all those years ago. He felt like he still had a storm to process – from the fact that _Voltron_ was finally coming back because _the war was over_ , to everything Keith had just said about his own cousin, to the fact that he still didn’t know what made Keith and Allura leave in the first place…

But Pidge was right. Lance trusted Allura. He knew they all did. She was Daibazaal’s princess, after all.

*

The first few quintants on Altea, Keith spent watching Allura teach Princess Romelle Altean magic. She started by teaching Princess Romelle some of the first things she learned when she was a kid from her own mother. Keith could remember his aunt first teaching Allura how to shrink and grow plants once she noticed Allura could control them.

At first, the magic lessons seemed slow and arduous, at least for Keith to watch, but it didn’t take Princess Romelle long to start picking it up. He had always known Allura was extremely powerful, but it was almost like magic itself, the way she could teach Romelle magic in a mere matter of vargas when she’d never known any before, even if she did turn out to be a really fast learner. And as he stood there, leaned against a pillar with them in a secluded section of the palace courtyard, he remembered being a kid and begging Allura to teach him, too.

Of course, he couldn’t learn it. Altean magic was something Alteans were born with and oh, had that broken his little heart to have to learn and accept. Even then, it took years for him to stop wishing he were magic. To stop wishing that he had just a little more Altean in him than he had – that he could do all the amazing things Allura could do. Shapeshifting, healing, conjuring force fields…

Sometimes, he forgot that Lotor used to wish the same thing, and that he probably still did. Sometimes he thought that Lotor’s jealousy of her magic, of her Altean appearance and her power was truly where his hatred of her stemmed from. Lately, he wondered if Lotor thought it was some sort of poetic justice to send them here. To make the one thing about Allura he could never be their new prison.

Princess Romelle was nowhere near ready to grow plants yet, but she was getting the hang of feeling life in the dirt – something Keith was learning about just as Princess Romelle was, though she seemed to find it much more interesting than he did. Bent over with her ear against the ground was how one of her guards found their princess, pausing in his stride and trying to keep a straight face as he announced that they’d just caught an intruder.

All the way back to the throne room, Keith couldn’t stop crazy thoughts that somehow it was his mom. That after days of trying to contact them, his mom magically somehow found him to tell him that the war wasn’t happening anymore and that they could all go back home. An uncontrollable hope followed and lodged itself in his chest that maybe somehow _Lance_ had–

But he knew that those were just _dreams_ though, crazy wishes that hurt enough when he was _asleep_ , and now… He shook his head, stuffed them down as Romelle led them behind her into a small room off her royal chamber where a man stood seemingly a little annoyed at having the Altean guards watch him like a hawk. He snapped to attention when Princess Romelle entered the room, but then his eyes landed on Allura, then on Keith and he froze.

He looked right at them with hazel eyes, and dark hair, and a fresh gaping scar across his nose–

“What happened?” Keith asked him, thoughtlessly. He thought maybe this was a crazy thought like his mom.

Shiro laughed a bit, sheepish and guilty. “I couldn’t just,” he stopped, started again. “I’m your knight. I couldn’t just let them send you away– _umph!_ ” he wheezed, cut off by Allura and Keith colliding into him, slotting their arms to fit around him. He let out a startled laugh and hugged them back.

Allura leaned away, reaching up to hold his face. “Are you hurt?” she fretted, eyes on his scar. Keith noticed Shiro relax into her touch.

“You shouldn’t worry about me, Princess, it’s just a scratch,” Shiro said back, because of course he would say that bleeding from the face right in front of them. “It’s kind of what I get for defecting, I guess–”

“You can’t go back to Daibazaal,” Keith said as he realized what this meant. “Lotor will kill you.”

“Shiro’s not going back to Daibazaal,” Allura decided with authority she didn’t quite have anymore, but Keith had never known that to stop her. She looked up into Shiro’s eyes, a timid smile on her lips. “I guess you’re stuck here with us, then. After all, I think we need our knight,” she laughed wetly.

Shiro laughed softly back, bringing up a hand to cover hers on his face and here on Altea, it didn’t have to be inappropriate. He brought them both close again and held on like he was afraid to let go.

Shiro had found them. It wasn’t a crazy thought.

*

Keith had missed the night time on Daibazaal so much he didn’t know what to do with it. On Altea, everything was so well lit it was sometimes hard to see much beyond its moon, but Daibazaal... For seven years he’d missed its stars and its moons and its sky, yearned to have them back, to see it all just one more time, so he jumped at the chance to be the one to find firewood the moment the sun started to set.

For once, Allura and Shiro didn’t try to shadow him, didn’t seem worried that he’d try to run off somehow, since there were so many other things to worry about. Everyone was busy with something or another.

Coran had found them shelter inside a cave, but there were still other matters to attend to, and the civilians were sure to bring it up. Allura and Shiro, ever the diplomats, stayed inside the cave to discuss options on what to do next. Hunk, who Keith had learned considered himself a chef, was busy cooking up the meat Pidge and Shay had hunted. Lance was tasked with keeping watch over their camp, meaning he stationed himself near the cave’s opening with his bow, but a couple of times, Keith had seen him kneel down to let some kid touch his bow if they asked, and he would smile at them so wide–

Keith told himself that it didn’t even have a little bit to do with why he’d insisted on being the one to come out for firewood.

It went without saying that Lance looked… different now. His hair was shorter, buzzed off where it used to hang over his ears and touch his nape, buzzed off right up until about halfway up his head where his locks started back. The hair up top was curlier than Keith knew Lance would have liked, but Keith had always liked his curls anyway. Somehow, he’d managed to grow even taller in the last seven years, and in place of the squishy-cheeked, baby face Keith had loved and cherished so much was a strong jawline and stubble. _Stubble_ – because Lance was a _man_ now.

“ _Focus_ ,” Keith sighed to himself, because he was really _trying_ to. He was _trying_ to focus on the task at hand, on hacking off branches with his blade, but his brain was stuck back on that battle field earlier. Stuck on how it felt to _see_ Lance for the first time in seven years – looking up right into his favorite blue…

And then _kissing_ him in the middle of everything, in the middle of flying arrows and hurdling swords and – god, he was still wondering what the hell had gotten into him to do that when he _knew_ –

“Hey!”

“ _Fuck,_ ” Keith gasped, blade gripped tight as he turned to see Lance standing there and beaming like he hadn’t just scared the shit out of him, like Keith hadn’t almost just sliced his head off with his blade. “What are you _doing_ over here?” Keith hissed back when he caught his breath. “You’re supposed to be keeping watch.”

“It’s okay, I got Pidge to cover for me for a while since she’s got a drone,” Lance said, pointing back over his shoulder. Keith leaned over to see her propped up just over the caves on a small rock ledge, trying to look like she wasn’t spying on them. “Come with me,” Lance said, grabbing Keith’s free hand in his. “There’s something I want to show you.”

Keith looked down at the branches he’d chopped so he wouldn’t look up and get stuck in the blue of Lance’s eyes all over again. “But, I’m–” he started, then made the mistake of doing exactly the wrong thing, of looking right into Lance’s eyes and felt his heart melt as if it was _thawing_. “Okay,” he managed, tucking his blade back into its holster behind his back. “What is it?”

“It’s obviously a surprise,” Lance chastised, “but trust me, you’re gonna love it.” He squeezed Keith’s hand, started to lead him back toward the cave and Keith forgot how to breathe. “And don’t worry about the firewood, I told Hunk, and he said he’ll send someone to finish up,” he explained, overexcited and enthusiastic, and Keith couldn’t help but laugh a little, a choked up thing he tried to cover with his hand.

He let Lance pull him along at a run to a cave neighboring the one they’d made camp in, like he’d been here before. Keith knew that before he left, Lance had never been out of Sector Five before. It would have been a privilege Lance’s family could never have afforded. It made Keith happy to see Lance navigating his way around some place new like this, somewhere Keith hadn’t even been.

It was a bitter thing, realizing that he’d lived in Daibazaal his whole life and had only been allowed to see so much of it. “Do you really know where you’re going? Because I’ve never been here before,” Keith admitted.

“Yeah, I figured,” Lance laughed, pulling Keith along by the hand into the dark depths of the cave. “Y _ou_ couldn’t walk much further beyond your backyard last time you were here, so yes, I know where I’m going.”

“Hey, I used to walk all the way across Sector Five to see _you_ ,” Keith argued, eyes down lovingly on their linked hands. He looked back up, at the back of Lance’s head, tousled brown locks blowing every which way as he walked. His cheeks hurt.

“It’s not that much farther of a walk,” Lance hummed as an update. “But to be honest, I probably haven’t been here since I was sixteen…”

Something about it had Keith rolling his eyes. His gaze trailed glowing vines, lining the cave walls in swirls. He looked for patterns in the senseless designs they made on the ground floor and watched Lance politely step over and around them. “Remember the last time we snuck off somewhere into the night?”

“Of course, I do,” Lance answered, eyes straight ahead.

In the last seven years, Keith had thought about almost nothing else. He thought about it all the time on Altea, even when he wanted to forget it. Sometimes, he could block it out if he distracted himself enough with other things, but when he was alone at night with nothing but his thoughts, it crept up on him. Thoughts of dragging Lance into the woods on his birthday, telling Lance he loved him for the first time, and Lance saying it back, falling asleep curled up together in the forest like they weren’t from two completely different worlds…. It had been nice to pretend they weren’t.

“That was the last time I saw you,” Lance said. “How could I forget it?”

Keith felt his heart stall in his throat, told himself to calm down. He’d known this was coming, but maybe he’d been just a bit naïve about how much it would hurt when it did. “Hey, I didn’t _leave_ you,” Keith blurted, just so Lance would finally hear it from him, just so he’d know. He tugged lightly at Lance’s hand until he stopped, turned him around, tried to make him look at him. “Not on purpose. I never wanted... I meant everything I said back then – I _loved_ you.”

Lance winced at those words, eyes down on their hands and his grip tightened. “Then what happened?” he asked. “Why did you just… _go_ to Altea without telling me? Why did you leave without saying goodbye?”

“I didn't have a _choice_ , Lance, our parents left in Voltron for the war like two days after that, and not even a week later, Lotor sent me and Allura away,” Keith explained, eyes on Lance’s face as he tried to work through everything he felt. “All our parents said when they found out was that it wasn’t safe for us to try coming back until Lotor wasn’t such a threat to Daibazaal. I guess they were afraid he’d do… exactly what he tried to do today.”

Lance stared, silent and pensive and it looked like the entire world was weighing on his mind, until finally, “Your mom told you to stay put and you _did?_ ” he asked. There was still some hurt in his eyes, but his lips were quirking up into a smirk. Keith felt his chest fill with relief that he was fixing it. “That doesn’t sound at all like the Keith I know. The one who used to sneak across the Fifth District all the time just to make out with a human peasant.”

“That’s because it isn’t,” Keith admitted with a _scoff_ , with a weak smile and something bitter – almost guilty – in his veins. “Since we landed on Altea, all I’ve ever tried to do was get back off of it. Shiro’s caught me climbing into a cargo ship with all my things so many times, he just started guarding over the hangar himself. I put Allura and Shiro through so much stress, they turned my own wolf against me. He comes to find me if he hasn’t seen me in too long and takes me back to Allura. He just always assumes that I’m–”

“Trying to get off Altea,” Lance murmured like he couldn’t quite believe it. Like he couldn’t quite grasp that Keith had missed him just as much as he had missed Keith, just like when they were young, just like before.

“Yeah,” Keith insisted, reached forward, grabbing both Lance’s hands in his. “I never stopped trying to get to you,” he promised. “The whole seven years, I never stopped.”

Lance scoffed, but it sounded choked up. His eyes were watering, and he tried to blink it away. “I was pretty sure you were dead. Or that you got married off and forgot all about me,” he explained with a wet laugh. “The fucked-up bit is that was the _best_ case scenario.”

Heart cracking behind his ribs, Keith released Lance’s hands, reaching up instead to hold Lance’s face. He had to push up on his toes a bit to get close enough, to make Lance look in his eyes, but when he did, Lance laughed again, relief mixed in with the sadness, as Keith promised: “I’d _never_ forget you, Lance. _Ever_.”

His own eyes were watering as he swiped his thumbs over Lance’s cheeks to clear the tears. Lance shut his eyes, leaned down to rest their foreheads together. “Me too. I couldn’t forget you if I wanted to,” he said back, and Keith started to feel a little dazed just having Lance this close to him again. “Not even when it’d be really beneficial not to think about you, like in the middle of a battle against one of Lotor’s generals,” Lance teased. “Or something.”

Keith sighed, peeled his eyes open just in time to see Lance wink. “Stupid,” he laughed wetly back.

Lance reached up to tilt his chin, thumb pulling lightly at his bottom lip. “You kissed me in the middle of, like, _all_ of it,” he reminded him.

“I _know_ ,” Keith groaned, unable to fight the flushing of his cheeks.

Lance grinned, leaning in just a bit closer. “So, you’re kinda stupid, too,” he continued.

Keith closed the gap between them, sealing his lips to Lance’s, feeling Lance smile soft and slow when he did. He pulled away, repeating: “I know.” Lance smiled so dopily down at him, Keith had to look away, had to clear his throat. “Look, do I get to see this surprise or what?”

Letting out a hesitant sigh, Lance reluctantly pulled away, grin uncontrollably sweet as he reached for Keith’s hand again. Keith tried to get a grip on himself, tried to get his heart to slow down and his head to catch up, but he felt so many things with Lance. He always had. He thought they must be soulmates. There was no one in all the galaxy Keith could ever love like he loved Lance.

The bioluminescent vines along the tunnel walls led them to the end of the tunnel, where up ahead, Keith could see a light source, then water coming into view as the cave tunnel opened up around them into a large curved chamber full of plants and trees with long, wispy leaves and flowers – things Keith didn’t know could live in a cave. Moonlight streamed in from large holes in the cave ceiling, landing in uneven spotlights on the trees and in the water. The cave ground broke off into a pool of resting underground water – clear and shimmering turquois, floating with flower blossoms.

“ _Wow_ ,” Keith murmured, wondering how deep the water went, where it was coming came from. He wondered how long this had all been here. “How did you even find this place?”

“Coran,” Lance answered simply, coming up to stand beside him. “Travelling is kind of required of a sorcerer’s assistant. There are all kinds of valuable magical stones in these caves. And it’s safe to swim in it,” Lance winked. “You know, if you wanted to shimmy out of that suit or anything–”

Before Keith could even stop to consider what he was doing, he was pushing Lance into the water, laughing uncontrollably as Lance squawked, and he felt like he hadn’t been this happy and carefree and _fun_ since– “Sorry,” Keith said as Lance resurfaced, leaning back when Lance splashed water at him.

“Dick,” Lance glared, lips twitching against a smile.

“Uh-huh,” Keith hummed, reaching back to undo the zipper of his suit and dragging it down. He slowly pealed the fabric off his shoulders and rolled it down his chest, over the underwear on his hips–

“Are you standing under the moonlight _on purpose?!_ ”

Keith rolled the suit down over his thighs, tilted his head down to hide his smile. “Oh, am I?”

“Fuck _you_ , you gorgeous asshole,” Lance griped, splashing more water up onto the rock.

Keith snorted, kicking off the feet of his suit, and jumping into the water. He swam up to an actively scowling Lance, leaning in and kissing his cheek. “Hi,” he smiled, biting down on a laugh as Lance glared back. He sighed and started fumbling with something at the back of his neck.

“Fucking sexy-ass boyfriend, strip tease in the goddamn moonlight like an angel,” he grumbled, thrashing a bit in the water. Keith grinned, face heating up embarrassingly at the word “boyfriend” like he was a teen again.

“What are you doing?”

“Trying to get this suit off so it dries!” Lance snapped.

Humming in understanding, Keith reached with both arms over Lance’s shoulders to find the zipper at the nape of his neck, stared into Lance’s eyes all the while, watched him flush down to his chest as he pealed the suit down for him. “Better?” Keith asked, cheeks starting to hurt from laughing.

Lance whimpered, managing to shimmy off the rest of his suit despite it clinging twice as hard submerged in the water as Keith held onto his shoulders like he couldn’t bare not touching him–

“ _Got it!_ ” Lance cheered, thrusting his balled up suit above the water into the air. He threw it onto the cave floor near Keith’s and then attacked, pulling Keith impossibly closer, chest to chest. He leaned in and kissed Keith silly.

Keith couldn’t help but laugh into the kiss, wrapping his legs around Lance’s waist as his arms circled secure and snug around his shoulders. Lance’s hands travelled down over his back, around his hips, over his ass and back up, up, up into his hair where they stopped for a minute. Moving one arm back down around Keith’s waist, Lance pulled away just a bit, just a breath, tugging lightly at Keith’s braid. Keith opened his eyes with his brain in a fog.

“What?” Keith asked breathlessly.

“Your hair’s so long,” Lance commented, mumbled. He sounded _wrecked_. Keith’s legs squeezed tighter around him. “I like it. Meant to tell you that earlier, but now I get to feel it.”

“Thanks,” Keith smiled, flustered.

Allura was the one who had convinced him to let it grow out. She braided it for him and combed it out here and there whenever she saw him getting too sad. After a while his hair became a comfort thing. It made him feel connected to his mom since hers had always been long. It made him feel proud of his Galra half, since there was no one else on Altea to do that for him but Allura. Somehow it meant the most to him that Lance liked it, too.

“I like yours, too,” Keith said back, reaching up to tousle his curls, smirking as Lance flushed again. “But I like your everything.”

“Damnit, Keith,” Lance swore, swooping back in, Keith holding on just as tight. He didn’t know how long they spent like that, happy to find that kissing Lance was just as timeless as he remembered, just as heart-stalling and all-consuming as he’d hoped it would be.

They only stopped to breathe, Keith unable to fight the stupid grin on his face. Lance pushed his bangs back, reached for something floating in the water.

“Don’t look,” he instructed.

Keith rolled his eyes, but none the less averted them as he felt Lance twist something into this hair, just over his ear. “What is it?” he dared.

“Flower,” Lance answered, leaning back a bit to admire his handywork. “Not as pretty as you, but–”

Keith kissed him again.

They found themselves back on the cave floor, feet dangling in the water side by side as they checked on their suits. Lance had stuck so many flowers into his hair, tucked into the twists of his braid, Keith was afraid to dislodge them if he moved too much. Keith had managed to stick a few into Lance’s curls so they wouldn’t move. They were so blue they almost matched his eyes.

Keith straightened out Lance’s suit beside his own folded up one, feeling that it didn’t have too much longer to dry. He looked down at the purples and the greys and blacks of the Marmoran stealth suit and shook his head.

“How did you even _get_ this suit?” he asked Lance fondly.

Keith turned to catch Lance in the act of staring at him, begged his own face to just stop burning for just a minute. “Stole it after you disappeared,” Lance answered back, bragging. “From the castle.”

“Why don’t I believe you?”

“Where else would I get one?” Lance countered knowingly. “It wasn’t even that hard. Stealing has kind of become my thing, you know,” he continued with a wink. Keith rolled his eyes.

“Okay, listen here, I’ll believe a lot of things. I completely believe that you became a hero while I was gone, but I refuse to believe that _you_ managed to grow sticky fingers.”

Lance gaped, affronted. “ _At least_ admit I stole your heart.”

“You can’t steal something someone wants you to have.”

Resting his head against his knees, Keith couldn't believe he'd blurted that out. He felt like he was going to _combust_ , felt like his smile was out of control, felt like if his heart beat any faster, it’d die in his chest like a battery and–

Lance hummed in contentment, dopey and syrupy as he grinned, lovestruck like he'd be happy to look at Keith for the rest of his life. “I want you to have something too,” he decided. He fumbled with his hands in his lap until Keith realized he was twisting a small ring off his finger.

“What is it?”

“It was my mom’s,” Lance answered. He reached over for Keith’s left hand, eyes mapping Keith’s face. “There's this whole story about how hard my dad worked to be able to afford it for her – they used to tell it to me and my siblings all the time. When the first riot happened, I guess she lost it. I happened to find it afterward in all the wreckage. This is pretty much all I have left of her.”

Keith shook his head, tried to pull his hand away. He'd read about the first riot while on Altea, but he'd never imagined… “I didn't _know_ ,” he murmured around his dry throat. “I _can’t_ take this if it’s all you have of her. You can't–”

“I want you to have it,” Lance insisted, reaching up to tug at a crystal hanging from his neck and Keith froze as he _realized_ – “I've still got this necklace from you, right? It was your mom’s. I’ve been _… out of my mind_ in love with you since I was twelve years old. I thought I was lucky enough just to get to be your friend, but then you liked me _back_ and if – if this is what my dad felt like when he gave this to my mom, then I’m never going to stop trying to give you this ring,” he admitted with a nervous laugh. “I lost my whole family and I thought I lost you, too. I’ll never get them back, but if by some miracle, I can still have you, then… please take it?”

Keith nodded, and he felt _boneless_ , felt like there was no sky or ground beneath him. “Okay,” he managed. Lance beamed, sliding the ring all the way down his finger, and Keith flexed it, knowing he was never going to take it off. He couldn’t help the way he grinned as Lance’s face finally went entirely red, couldn’t stop smiling as Lance leaned back in and kissed him quick before he could even respond.

“Thanks,” Lance hummed, and Keith _choked_ – couldn’t believe Lance was _thanking_ him for loving him _back_ , when there was a sudden, loud _pop!_ startling Lance into a yell, but Keith knew exactly what was coming.

He tried to brace himself for the oncoming impact, but he never really could, grunting as heavy paws struck against his chest, pushing him off balance. A weight evened out over his back as he hit the ground, vision blocked by a mass of blue and black fur.

“ _Ow_ ,” Keith groaned, wincing in pain as his stupid blink wolf breathed rancid dog breath right into his face. “Hey, boy,” he managed.

“Oh, wow,” Lance blinked, catching his breath. Keith could hear him scooting back from the water and closer to him. “This your wolf babysitter?”

“This is _Kosmo_ ,” Keith corrected, fighting to sit up with a full grown wolf sitting on his chest, licking and slobbering all over his face. “And he must have been worried about us all day. Allura probably sent him looking for me as soon as he found her.”

“Not convincing me he’s not your babysitter,” Lance told him.

Kosmo yipped and whined out his worry and relief at finding him, and Keith couldn’t help but laugh, reaching up to scratch him behind the ears. “I’m _okay_ , big guy,” he promised, gently holding his head so they were eye to eye. “I promise I have a _really_ good excuse why we didn’t come back to the castle, but I’m _so_ glad you found me,” he cooed, lapsing into laughter as Kosmo licked his face and neck. “I know I've been gone _all day,_ I’m sorry to worry you like that.”

“Adorable,” Lance commented, looking between the two of them.

Keith smiled, pushing Kosmo off of him despite his whining. “We should get dressed. I think Kosmo wants to take us to Allura.”

Lance nodded, looking just as reluctant to leave as Keith felt as he made to stand.

Kosmo yipped and whined impatiently as they got dressed. Lance complained very pointedly about the feet of his suit still being a little wet, and _jammed_ his wet, cold toes into the small of Keith’s back through his zipper opening until Kosmo finally had enough, charging at them and warping them away.

They opened their eyes to a flurry of motion and a barrage of sound back at the camp site. People were _dancing_ , Keith realized, by the light of the firepit in the center of the cave. Coran seemed to be making music with something he’d magicked together out of wood and stone.

“Is this a _party?_ ” Lance squawked, confused and excited all at once.

“ _Keith!_ ” Allura exclaimed suddenly from across the cave where she was dancing with Hunk. She bowed to him politely, then rushed over to Keith, pulling him off the ground by the hands like he weighed nothing, just like always. “Kosmo found you! Come dance with me!”

Clumsily, Keith stumbled after her, laughing as he was pulled this way and that by her every move, just like when they were kids. He noticed Shiro dancing with an excited Pidge who managed to find some way to seem commanding while standing on his toes.

“What?” Allura asked with a knowing look, reaching up to poke at his cheeks – sore from smiling all night.

“ _Nothing_ ,” Keith snapped, batting her hand away, but his smile was there to stay. “So, I take it attack-planning went well while I was gone?” he laughed.

“Shut up,” Allura said back, with a growing smile of her own. “What was I supposed to do? Tell everyone they can’t celebrate surviving today?” she snapped, then reared back in false shock when Keith burst out laughing. “ _What?!_ ” she demanded.

“Nothing,” Keith repeated, stumbling a bit as Allura jerked him to the left. “Just. I love you. And I’m really happy.”

Smiling, Allura hummed in response sending Keith twirling in a powerful spin. He got bounced around from partner to partner, noticing everyone else did, too. He caught glimpses of Shiro dancing with Allura, then Allura getting bounced back to Hunk, while Shay spun into Shiro, and then eventually, Keith made it back to Lance.

“Hey,” Lance said, catching him by the waist. “Long time no see.”

“We’ve survived worse,” Keith said back, feeling winded and weightless and so many other wonderful, stupid, disorienting things.

“Yeah, yeah,” Lance rolled his eyes. He lifted a hand from Keith’s waist to rest over the one Keith placed on his shoulder, right over the ring and it felt like a promise. Felt like forever. Keith couldn’t imagine a better way to spend forever.

*

Despite a night of partying, Allura was up with the suns and bustling around. Lance wanted to be surprised, but something in him just thought this made annoying sense. Keith glared on in frustration as Hunk forced himself up to make breakfast, and as everyone else slowly rose from sleep, Allura bombarded them with plans and courses of action as if she’d never been tired in all her life.

The day ticked by in dobashes and vargas of strategizing and grouping and taking stock of weapons, and soon enough, it was sunset. Soon enough, they would be taking off in their stolen ship for the palace. For Lotor. It felt like a wild dream or some kind of hyperbolic joke but it was real. Before the night was out, either Lotor would be stopped or…

Lance felt the stress in his veins just like he’d felt the luck potion. He couldn’t make sense of his emotions, pulled this and that way like they were. He supposed he should be feeling determined and a little bit nervous, as he loaded supplies onto the ship, but with Keith bumping hips with him as they passed up and down the ramp as he wore Lance’s _jacket_ – with Keith sending him that reserved, shy _smile_ – Lance lost his train of thought every time, only kept in this _realm_ by Pidge’s incessant badgering to come along.

“I won’t get in the _way_ ,” she stressed, arms outstretched in frustration at Allura who merely sighed and continued onto the ship with her box of weapons. “Come on, Keith! _You_ want me to come right?” She pressed, turning to him the second he turned in her direction.

“I think you’d kick ass,” Keith answered honestly. For a second, Lance wondered if the reason Pidge had given the jacket back to Keith in actuality hadn’t been as entirely selfless as she’d claimed. Keith stood there in the middle of the ramp, sinfully adorable with the sleeves of Lance’s jacket going past his hands. Lance knew he wanted to give Pidge the world just for the jacket, but he cut a glance over to Shiro, standing near the boxes, arms crossed and expression unamused as he watched her. “But you know it’s not up to me.”

Pidge groaned, emphatic and whiny, and oh-so-very-teenagery as she turned angry, impatient eyes onto Shiro. “Shiro, what do I have to _do?!_ ”

“Stop whining and let us prepare,” he answered back with a shrug so heartless, Lance had to hide a scoff into his hand. Pidge shot Lance a glare and he went back to sorting through his different types of arrows until she looked away.

“Oh, come on, Shiro, I can fight, and you know it!” Pidge insisted, stalking angrily toward him, uncaring that she nearly knocked Hunk right over on the way. “You saw me during that battle! I took down at least ten soldiers!”

“You did?” Lance squawked.

“ _Yes_ , and he _saw_ me!”

“Shiro,” Allura started, gaping at what she’d just heard.

“I’m not sure what I saw, there was a lot going on,” Shiro defended. “I wouldn’t have let Keith do this either when he was Pidge’s age, you know!” he continued as Allura rolled her eyes, hiding her own scoff. “Is it really so crazy that I don’t want her getting hurt?”

“But, I won’t!” Pidge insisted. “I’m plenty responsible. Shay lets me do whatever I want!”

“Helping to run an orphanage is entirely different from an insurgence.”

“Shay already said I could come,” Pidge snapped. “And Keith and Allura are fine with it.”

“Me, too,” Lance chimed in, avoiding Shiro’s eyes all together, though he could still feel them.

“I don’t have a problem with it,” Hunk admitted, hauling another crate onto the ship to hide his own face.

“ _See?!_ ” Pidge demanded. “You’re the only one with the problem!”

Lance snorted again, making eye contact with Keith who looked just as amused and impressed by Pidge’s tenacity. Lance opened his mouth to speak again, but finally, after a long moment of glaring at the ground, Shiro made a decision.

“If you can get three arrows into the knot on that tree in under ten ticks,” he started with an exhausted sigh and point at said tree over her shoulder. “Then you can come. “If not, you’re stuck here until we get back. Sound fair?”

Pidge looked confidently over her shoulder at the tree in question, then boldly back at Shiro. “Fine,” she agreed. She turned and pulled her bow from hanging over her arm, reached back over her shoulder to grab an arrow, lined up her shot and made her first hit, then quickly shot the other two, all perfectly inside her target. “I’m coming,” she announced with a glare over her shoulder at Shiro, who merely stood there stock-still and shocked as Pidge stomped over to the tree to get her arrows.

And Shiro started to yell back about orders and safety and following instructions, but Lance couldn’t hear a word of it as Keith walked by him, bumped hips with him again. Lance watched him walk away, wanting nothing more than to grab him and kiss the _life_ out of him – they'd barely even gotten to _speak_ yet today–

“Lance, are you listening?”

“Huh?” he jumped, blinking to find Allura snapping her fingers in front of his face to get his attention. He could see Keith smirking at him from over her shoulders and tried to school his blush. “What’s that, Princess?” he managed.

“I said we're leaving,” she repeated, albeit a bit impatiently as she stared up at him. “Everyone else is ready, are you good?”

“Yeah, I’m good to go!” Lance answered, with a tug at his bow slung across his chest. She hummed and left it at that, though she shot him a look over her shoulder as she boarded the ship. It was getting darker, Shiro and Pidge had literally argued into the sunset and Lance was here fantasizing about his boyfriend. _Jesus, get it together._

Hunk clapped him on the shoulder as he walked by, messing with his gauntlets on the way up the ramp into the ship. Shiro walked past Lance, toting the last of the crates as Pidge sauntered onto the ship behind him, smugly silent. He risked another glance at Keith only to find him already looking back.

He edged his way back down the ramp and over to Lance and just the look in his eyes pulled Lance in toward him like the tides to the shore. He reached out with helpless hands, fingers wrapping soft and tender around long braided locks over his shoulder. Lance sighed and tried to reign in his feelings. _Determined and_ _a little bit nervous_ , he told himself, not desperate enough to want to grab Keith and run.

And he wanted to tell Keith that no matter what happened tonight, they’d be okay, but he couldn’t make the words come because he lost all control of his mouth when he was this scared and, _god_ was he _scared, god was he–_ He wanted to say that they’d have each other’s backs and look out for each other, just like they did when they fought the generals yesterday. He wanted to say they didn’t have to worry. He wanted to be _able_ to say that.

Keith sighed like he knew _exactly_ what Lance wanted to say, exactly what was going through his mind. Lance felt as if he were on a string – he felt just like he did when he was fifteen and revolved around Keith as if in orbit, and he couldn’t stop himself from pulling Keith close by the hips and, pressing their lips together to try to say everything his words wouldn’t.

Keith melted in his hold, soft fingers slipped into his hair as even softer lips pressed hard against his. For just a moment Lance didn’t have to think about where he was, or what he was about to do, or even what he was _supposed_ to be doing that minute with everyone else. For a moment, it was just the two of them alone in the universe with nowhere else to be but with each other.

He pulled away just enough to see into Keith’s eyes, just enough to see Keith trying to lean back in. “Promise me I’m not going to lose you again,” Lance said, breathless and desperate as Keith blinked owlishly back. “No matter what happens out there, we have to stick together so I can watch your back and you can watch mine and we’ll be a _team_ , but you _have_ to come back to me,” he stressed. “Because if you don’t–”

“I promise,” Keith rushed out, just as serious, just as emphatic. “You won’t lose me. I’m not going anywhere without you. I just got you back. They’re going to have to kill me this time.”

“ _God_ , don’t jinx it,” Lance sighed with a tired smile.

“I love you,” Keith told him, innocent and blunt like a reminder, like Lance would be remiss if they proceeded and Keith had forgotten to tell him and–

Lance grinned, leaning his forehead gently against Keith’s and shut his eyes. “I love you, too,” he breathed. “The last time we said this–”

“This isn’t last time,” Keith swore, hands coming up to hold Lance’s face. “We’re not going to lose each other this time.”

Gently, the sound of someone clearing their throat made them freeze. They looked over to see Hunk, looking reluctant to have to break them up. “Alright love birds, time to head out.”

With one last look, Keith pulled Lance onboard as the ship sealed behind them. Inside, Allura was already running over the plan again, but Lance knew that no matter how well they’d planned the next couple of hours, Lotor would be expecting them.

The impending sense of dread didn’t lessen even in the time it took to make it back to Sector Five, or to land the ship safely and unseen in the woods. It didn’t lessen as they sneaked through the empty city devoid of even drones, even as they made their way to the castle and moved silently through the sveldte stalks so they wouldn’t be seen.

Shiro led them through the back gate, ripping it open and ushering them through as Allura looked around. It went unsaid that the fact that there were no guards making rounds couldn’t be a good sign.

“Alright, let’s go,” Allura decided, grouping up with Keith and Lance to search the castle for Lotor. Shiro gathered up Hunk, Pidge, and Coran to go down into the dungeons for the prisoners. “We’ll meet back in the woods when we’re done.”

They split into their groups to head off, but then Shiro spoke up, reaching out to stop Allura by the arm. “Allura, wait,” he rushed out. She turned back to him in confusion only to be met with Shiro’s lips against hers in a short, hasty kiss. “Be careful,” he said with pleading eyes. He reached out for Keith next, pulled him roughly into his arms, and Keith quickly hugged him back. “ _Please_ ,” Shiro stressed, making Keith laugh a bit.

“ _You_ be careful,” Keith chastised. “No more scars.”

“Same to you,” Shiro said back.

Lance looked around them at Hunk who was already staring right back. “Please be careful,” Hunk said, stepping close and crushing Lance in a hug. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

“No luck potion this time, you don’t have to worry,” Lance promised, laughing quietly as Hunk scoffed. “Be safe. And take care of Pidge.”

Coran wished them each good luck as Pidge hugged them each in turn until Allura and Shiro made them all stop. Allura guided Keith and Lance along as Shiro did the same with the others. Lance could see the worry and terror in Shiro’s face at the thought of leaving his family. Lance wasn’t going to let anything happen to them.

“Okay, the tunnels, right?” Allura checked, falling back to let Keith take the lead.

He led the way quickly and silently to the tunnels near the back, accessible from the outside only by a low barred-up window just above the ground. As if he’d done this a million times, Keith knelt down and showed them how to finagle the bars and slide themselves through. Allura went in first, then Lance, and finally Keith once they were both safely inside. As he waited for Keith to shimmy through last, Lance took a quick look around, observing that they had landed into a tunnel that probably led to a mote, water coming up to their shins as they tried to quiet their sloshing.

Keith walked on ahead to lead the way again and Lance fell into line beside Allura. He noticed the tunnels were lined with bright blue lights along the ceilings and floors, shimmering underneath the water. “So, what is this place even supposed to be?” Lance asked, noting the plants that grew along the edges of the floors where the water reached.

Keith slowed down a bit to let Allura take the lead as he reached for Lance’s hand, staring determinedly straight ahead as he squeezed just a little. “I don’t really know what this place is meant for. The cooks come down here to take breaks sometimes in the day, but no one ever comes here at night.”

They walked on until they finally came to a door, heavy and difficult to push open through all the water. Keith peeked outside through the opening they made out into the hall and gestured that it was safe to proceed.

“We’re under the kitchens,” Keith pointed out, taking quiet steps forward.

Allura hummed softly, nudging shoulders with Keith. “This brings back memories, doesn’t it?”

“What, sneaking around for midnight snacks?” Lance asked.

Allura grinned as Keith’s cheeks flushed. “I guess that depends on what you would call a snack,” she chortled, ducking out of the way of Keith’s elbow. She flattened herself against the wall and peered around the corner, gesturing for them to proceed as she took the lead this time.

Keith sighed, falling back into step with Lance. “This is the way I would sneak out to see you,” he admitted.

Lance hummed, feeling like this was an absolutely horrible time to feel as mushy in the guts as he did at that moment. “That’s fantastic, will tease you about it at a better, more appropriate time,” he decided.

Keith and Allura took turns, alternating between look out and group leader all the way up the castle. As they walked, taking twists and turns through endless hallways and stairwells, Lance couldn’t help but notice the sheer number of portraits along all the walls.

There were so many of King Zarkon and Prince Alfor and Princess Krolia, even as children. Lance could tell because of how much they looked like slightly-off versions of Keith, Allura, and Lotor, but at the same time, they _weren’t_ like them. At least not dynamically.

King Zarkon, Prince Alfor, and Princess Krolia all seemed to enjoy playing together as children according to these portraits full of smiles and hugs and hand-holding. They were each other’s best friends.

As the three of them got older, there wasn’t much that changed. Prince Alfor married Princess Lura, King Zarkon married Queen Honerva. Princess Krolia wasn’t in that portrait.

Then came portraits of King Zarkon, Queen Honerva and a baby Prince Lotor – an innocent ball of purple, soft flesh wrapped in his mothers’ arms as he slept. Then Prince Alfor, Princess Lura and baby Allura with her bright blue eyes and pink cheek marks, glowing as she grinned…

And finally, a portrait of Princess Krolia alone with a tiny baby Keith, asleep and just as angry-looking and irritable as Lance had somehow expected of him as an infant. He bit his lip against a grin, staring until he had to walk past it. He wondered how anyone could look at Keith and not immediately love him.

As they walked, everyone in the portraits grew older. Allura and Lotor becoming small children, while Keith was only a toddler. He looked at them like they were his very best friends. It was when Lotor and Allura started to look like teens that the portraits changed. From what Lance remembered, that was around the time _everything_ changed between them. He couldn’t help but notice how different Keith looked in portraits with Lotor and Allura. How other.

The number of portraits dwindled, but they still told a story. Group portraits tended to just be Keith and Allura while Lotor stood in his alone until Keith grew into his teen years, then they stopped. The last portrait with Keith in it was the last Keith Lance ever saw.

The only portraits that continued were of Lotor, but even they stopped after a short while, after so many floors, making it clear to Lance when they reached the royal floor – no portraits for visiting eyes.

There were no guards outside Lotor’s chambers, Allura noted as she peeked around the corner, which was possibly the biggest red flag of all.

Lance took the lead this time, drawing his bow and arrow, Keith and Allura falling into line behind him as he crept down the hall and slowly pushed open Lotor’s chamber doors, only to find the room completely empty.

“What the fuck?” Lance whispered.

Keith took careful steps forward, walked toward the window, looked outside of it. “I don’t like this.”

“Look, whatever this is, we can take it,” Allura told them, though she sounded just a bit unsure. “Just keep a sharp eye. Let’s look around.”

They fanned out into the room, sure to face all directions, weapons drawn in case of a surprise attack. Lance hated this just as much as Keith did, felt like they were going to regret this. He felt like they were sitting ducks, like Lotor was toying with them, but somehow, he knew in his gut that this was where they needed to be. Lance fidgeted, fingers twitching over his shoulder on his arrows.

While Keith examined Lotor’s desk, Allura cautiously pulled open the doors of the wardrobe in the corner of the room, sighing when it was revealed to be empty. She unfolded her staff, backing up as she scanned the room until she backed into Keith. Lance spun slowly around the room once more, jumping at the sound of a loud _pop_ as well as the sight of movement just over Keith’s shoulder.

“Keith!” he exclaimed, raising his bow and aiming, stopping just in time not to hit Kosmo as he barked and nearly tackled Keith to the ground. “ _Shit, Kosmo_ ,” Lance sighed, heart hard in his chest.

“Okay, you found me,” Keith whispered, trying frantically to shush him. “You have to be quiet, buddy.”

“He must have been worried in the cave,” Allura said, rushing over to quiet Kosmo with her hands behind his ears.

Kosmo only whined back, pawing desperately at Keith’s chest as he stood on his hind legs. He panted and yipped, and Keith joined Allura at petting and holding him, trying to calm him down, trying to get him to _stop_.

“Shhhhh, shhhh,” Keith whispered. “Calm down, Kosmo, you’re gonna get us caught. What’s wrong with you?”

But before Kosmo could make another sound, there was another movement, this time from behind Allura. Lance acted quickly, fingers snatching an arrow from behind him and readying it in his bow. “ _Allura!_ ” he yelled, just as Kosmo howled, ran directly into Allura and Keith, vanishing them away just as a sword rushed down where Keith had been standing.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Lance swore, panicking as he realized that it was Lotor. That he was right about it all being a trap, and that he'd just lost Keith and Allura.

“I knew I should have killed that mutt when I had the chance,” Lotor said. He lifted his sword from the groove he’d made in the floor, looked up, and Lance gawked at the sight of him.

He looked, inexplicably, like he’d aged decapheebs in a matter of _months_. His skin had become pale and sallow, hair stringy and thin like he was _sick_. It was unbelievable that Lotor would even be _seen_ like this, when he wasn’t at his very best. Lotor did not _exist_ until he looked put-together – until he was undeniably better than you by simple visual comparison, but… Maybe he still was. Because somehow, he also looked _bigger_. Stronger and more formidable as he took an intimidating step forward. It was like his body was operating on its own, while the soul withered away inside it – like all that was truly left of Lotor was the mania in his eyes.

“ _This_ is why you weren't at the tournament,” Lance realized with mounting horror. “This is why no one's seen you in _months_. You’re wasting away.”

“Oh, you’ll see I’m far from deteriorating,” Lotor informed him with a dangerous smirk, tapping at the groove he’d made in the metal flooring with his sword – with his own _strength_.

“What did you _do_ to yourself?”

“I did what no one else _could_ ,” Lotor spat with a toothy smile and manic, leering eyes. “Quintessence is a resource not many are strong enough to control. My own mother couldn’t survive it's unbridled intensity longer than a matter of weeks, but I’m stronger. Voltron won’t take Daibazaal back from me. I’ll see to it that no one does, especially not princess Altea and your precious half-breed.”

“Well, good luck even finding them,” Lance glared back. “Even if somehow you _could_ get to them, they’d destroy you, so it’s a good thing you’ve just got to deal with me. We’re going to win, and Keith is probably going to kill you when he gets his hands on you. And when he does, Allura is going to take over and everything you’ve tried to build is going to crumble.”

Lotor went very still then, and Lance couldn’t stop the strike of fear that ripped through him – the first feeling of true danger he’d felt all night. “We'll see about that,” Lotor decided, eyes glinting as he lifted his sword and charged.

Lance fell back, just catching himself before he hit the floor. He tried to steady his bow and arrow, but Lotor attacked again, destroying his desk in the process. Breathing hard, Lance dodged out the door into the hall, taking aim again and letting his arrow fly, only for Lotor to bat it away with his sword. Lotor moved toward him.

Lance turned and took off down the long hallway ahead, looking for a way out and trying to gathered his wits about the fact that _quintessence_ had done this to Lotor. He couldn’t believe he had _missed_ it – _what else_ would Lotor have been doing with it but trying to make himself more powerful? And with Voltron coming back, he’d probably gone full quintessence power-hungry psycho the moment he found out.

“ _This_ is the mighty, courageous Blue Bandit?” Lotor taunted. He sounded far enough back that Lance risked a look over his shoulder to see him walking evenly after him as if he wasn’t worried about losing Lance at all.

He shuddered, turning around to and shooting another arrow, only for Lotor to block it again just as easily as before. Hissing in annoyance, Lance ran and turned corners until he came to a door at the end of the hall. Desperately, he pushed it open to find a set of stairs that only went up. Lance swore, taking them two at a time and wishing now more than ever that he had Allura and Keith with him, since they’d know how to go _down_ the castle.

“I must say this is a letdown,” Lotor continued, entering the staircase just as Lance reached the third flight. “Isn’t it said that you’ve taken on entire armies? You can’t even fight _me_ one-on-one.”

Lance grit his teeth as he reached the top of the stairs, finding only another door. He pushed through it, not all that surprised to find himself on the roof. More of a balcony, he realized, judging by the plants and furniture. There were sectioned-off lounge areas separated by high partitions and a low-rise barrier acting as a gate wrapping around the roof to protect anyone from what looked to be about a 100-foot drop if this went badly.

“Okay, you’re okay, you’re _okay_ ,” Lance told himself, knowing any second now, Lotor was going to come through that door. “Allura and Keith are fine and Shiro is not gonna kill you for losing them.” He took a deep breath and stationed himself in the middle of the balcony. He reached over his shoulder for one of his new arrows, the detonating ones, and positioned it in his bow. “You’re gonna take this walking monologue down and you’re gonna find Keith again, kiss the hell out of him and live happily ever after if you just _focus_.”

He waited with bated breath for Lotor to come through the door. He aimed high, head-level–

He released the arrow the moment the door started to open. It flew wide and banged back against the wall as the arrow struck and exploded, forcing Lance back a bit. He held his breath, waiting as the smoke billowed out and blocked his view, took careful steps back and readied another arrow…

He let it fly just as Lotor walked through the smoke. His arrow landed, and another explosion shook the roof, barely seeming to affect Lotor at all.

Gasping for breath, Lance made it behind one of the partitions under the cover of all the smoke. He tried to quiet his breathing to listen for Lotor’s movements. Lance heard him go still. He sighed, then he laughed, a hummed out lilt of a thing before he started to move again. Lance held his breath.

“What was all that you said about me being lucky I’ve only got to deal with _you?_ ” Lotor taunted. It echoed in the air and Lance lost where Lotor was for a second until he started walking again, slow and deliberate as if he were pacing, waiting for Lance to come out. “I suppose when I’m finished with you, I’ll have to see about the half-breed killing me, and the princess crumbling my empire,” he laughed, footsteps coming to a halt.

Lance held his breath, looking down and seeing to shadow of Lotor’s feet on the other side of the partition. Quickly, he set up another detonating arrow and bracing himself, as he saw something glinting from above – Lotor’s sword, raised high over his head, starting to crash down…

Lance charged, jumping out from behind his partition with a yell as he shot his arrow right into Lotor’s arm and rolled out of the way just before it exploded. Skidding across the ground as he landed, he tried to gather his surroundings, tried to see through the smoke, tried to listen through the echoing for the source of Lotor’s pained yells–

Lotor burst through with smoke wafting off him and the arrow protruding from his shockingly still intact arm. It was dripping yellow liquid rather than blood as Lotor stalked right for him. Panicked, Lance scrambled back, tried to get up, but Lotor was quicker, already on him, already striking him against the head with the hilt of his sword. Everything went _white_.

His head lolled back against the ground, and he swore he saw _something_ – something huge and _fast_ – flying across the sky toward them, toward the castle, but then–

Lotor attacked again while Lance’s vision was too blurry to see him, while his body was too weak to stop him from dragging his sword against his shoulder as he leaned down over him. He positioned the edge of his sword right over his chest.

Lance breathed hard, tried to stay awake, tried to stay _here_ , and with a burst of adrenaline – with all his strength – he batted Lotor’s sword away and reached with his uninjured shoulder behind him. He ignored the searing _pain_ as the movement pulled his shoulder, grabbed another arrow and stabbed it into Lotor’s chest, fighting through the blackness trying to take him under as he held it there, forced it deeper and deeper until, screaming, Lotor dropped his sword and clanked against the ground.

Lance’s head lolled back again as he nearly lost consciousness. He felt weak and tired, too numb to fight the heavy waves trying to pull him under anymore. Lotor didn’t rise again, down in a heap by Lance’s feet as he tried to pull the arrow out. Above, Lance was sure he saw the blur in the sky getting closer and closer between slow, blurry blinks…

“ _Lance_ _!_ ”

That voice. The insurmountable amount of _pain_ trying to take him under was nothing in light of the relief and happiness he felt at hearing Keith’s voice – to knowing he was _alright_. “Keith,” he mouthed, unable to get his voice to work, willing Keith to come closer since he couldn’t keep his eyes open.

“ _Lance_ , Lance, no, _no, no, no_!” Keith fussed, skidding to his knees at his side. He held Lance’s face in his hands, trying to swipe the hair from his face, trying to assess the damage, trying to keep himself together. “You have to stay with me! _You promised me!_ Allura!”

“I’m doing what I can, Keith, I’m trying!”

_“Lance!”_

Everything went black.

*

Keith would remember, for years to come, meeting a blue-eyed boy half a head shorter than him who didn’t realize who he was before pushing him face down in the street.

He’d remember the embarrassment and praying to the stars that nobody just saw that, then knowing that if they hadn’t seen the fall, they’d see his _guards_ all but ambushing him seemingly from nowhere – though Keith knew exactly where – to help him up and defend him from a kid his own age.

Mostly, he would remember the shock on the other boy’s face as he blinked up at Keith’s guards seemingly miles tall as they caged Keith in, forcing him to peek around arms and legs to see Keith at all.

Being escorted back to the palace, and his mother all but demanding that the royal advisors didn’t lock Keith up in the palace all because of one kid – to let Keith _be_ a kid – all that blended together in his mind. The long-winded talks about poise and regality and the public eye barely registered to him at all in the wake of thinking he’d already lost the very first friend he’d ever made.

He would remember seeing the blue-eyed boy again, weeks later, playing in the street with his ball, stopping to look at him across the way. The hesitant walk to meet in the middle. The apologies and the bowing and the long, endless royal title–

“Keith,” he would interrupt. “I’m just Keith.”

The frantic look of blue eyes searching for more guards to spring out and tackle him if he made a wrong move, then the hesitant resilience across his face as he mumbled out that he was “just Lance.”

He would think of Lance in the years that followed, some together and far too many spent apart. He would think of Lance and he would remember that there had never been anything “just” about him.

*

The first thing he heard was his own breathing.

It was heavy and deep as he slowly woke up – so deep, he was sure it was what had roused him in the first place. He sighed, feeling immediately that he was starving. He tried to think back to the last time he’d eaten.

Suddenly, there was the sound of a hatch releasing and pressurized air escaping, and just as suddenly, he was falling, tipping forward until he hit something soft and warm, something that held him back.

“Lance! I got you,” Keith said, as Kosmo barked and bumped at their legs.

“Keith,” Lance mumbled back, peeling his eyes open against the bright lights above that begged him to shut them again. It was blurry as he peaked out through squinted eyes, but it was alright. He was looking at _Keith_ , he realized as he tried to balance on his wobbly legs, so it was alright.

“Hey, you should sit down,” Keith murmured, eyes looking everywhere but at him. He moved them back just a bit, lowered them down onto the steps up to the pod Lance realized he had come out of. Keith took one look at him and threw his arms around him, burying his face in his neck and just holding him. “I’m so glad you’re okay. You have no idea how _worried_ I was. I thought I,” he shook his head against Lance’s neck and didn’t speak again to finish his thought.

Reluctantly, Lance pulled back, pulled Keith’s face up so he could see him. He peered into his eyes with a reassuring smile. “Hey, I’m _okay_ ,” he said emphatically. As he looked at Keith, he could piece together he’d nearly fallen apart over this. He could only hope that hearing it in his own words would start to piece Keith back together.

Keith looked exhausted, with his sleepy smile and dark bags beneath unfocused eyes. His hair was more in a long knot than a braid as it hung limply over his shoulder, and he probably hadn’t taken off Lance’s jacket once since he went into the pod. Behind them was a small blanket, more evidence for why Keith was such a wreck.

“I’ve got a _lot_ to tell you,” Keith said rather than address Lance’s statement, or let him get another word out. He looked to Kosmo who was resting his head against his thighs, reached down to scratch behind his ears. “Hey, will you go get everyone? Go get Allura,” Keith told him.

Lance watched as Kosmo yipped back, then vanished, probably across the castle. “Is everything okay?” Lance worried.

“Yeah, everything’s fine,” Keith answered, sure to calm Lance down before he started. “It’s just a lot, like I said,” Keith repeated with tired eyes. “I’m trying to figure out how I should… I’ll just start from the – from the beginning,” he decided, and dropped the bomb that Lance had been unconscious in the pod for _four days_ with a fractured skull and a deep tear into his shoulder. They had all been worried Lance might not make it out. Allura had done all she could at the scene to stop the swelling, but only time could do the rest.

Coran had said that Keith and Allura had found him just in time. If they’d been any more than half a varga later, Lance probably would have had long-lasting brain damage at the least.

Keith’s wide-eyed panic suddenly made screeching sense.

“I’m so sorry,” Keith blurted before Lance could stop him, before Lance could assure him that he wasn’t mad, that he hadn’t even thought to blame him, that nothing that had happened that night was his fault. “I’m sorry Kosmo took me and Allura like that. I think he was worried about us, and he can sense when things are wrong, so he must have known Lotor was there somewhere, so he saved us,” Keith explained. “We tried to get back to you, but we ran into the generals–”

“Keith,” Lance interrupted, pulling his hands gently into his own, so he’d stop fiddling with them. “ _This is not your fault_ ,” he stressed with an assuring smile. He ducked his head down to catch Keith’s upset stare. It wasn’t until he reached to hold Keith’s chin that he stopped trying to look away. “It’s okay. Alright? What matters is that you found me. You and Allura saved my life. You didn’t lose me.”

Keith stared back at him, not looking relieved in the slightest, but Lance stayed steady, smiling lovingly down at him, used his thumb to pull his bottom lip from between his teeth. He held Keith’s face and stayed close until his brows finally unfurrowed. He shut his eyes, exhausted. “Everyone told me you’d say that. It was just… really hard, seeing you like that. We promised we weren’t going to be separated again, and then I thought I was going to have to watch you die.”

“Well, I didn’t,” Lance said, gently cupping Keith’s face in his hands so he couldn’t escape his words. “I didn’t leave you. I kept my promise. I’m gonna keep it forever. You’re never going to lose me.”

Finally, _finally_ , Keith smiled. Small and weak, but still a smile. He nodded. “Thanks. And me too, about the… you’re better with words than me.”

Lance smiled back, twined his fingers together with Keith’s and held on tight, since they were both good at that.

“Wait,” Lance remembered. “What about Lotor?”

“He’s dead,” Keith admitted hesitantly, like he didn’t know the proper respect for this, or rather, whether to have any at all. “We found a store room full of quintessence after he died. At first we thought it was Honerva’s, since quintessence killed her, too, but it wasn’t. He’d been mining it as long as Allura and I have been gone and I guess he went overboard, just like Honerva did all those years ago. It’s like all the quintessence in his body burned up all that was left of him while he bled out. He was dead before Voltron even landed.”

“Oh, god,” Lance gasped, so shocked, he’d nearly missed all that about Voltron making it back. Lance knew Keith and Lotor had never been close, but Keith had still always considered Lotor to be his family. The same with his uncle. Lance had never heard Keith say anything overly good about King Zarkon, but he’d never heard him say anything horrible either. “Are you okay?” he managed.

“You know, with the way Lotor was going, I really don’t think there was another end for him,” Keith answered, like it was something he’d had to tell himself again and again. Something he’d had to come to terms with. “It’s all really tragic. Lotor died, and then when Voltron landed, we found out that King Zarkon was killed in the war. He didn’t come back with Voltron,” Keith revealed, sounding like he was still having trouble believing it. “I keep telling myself that at least he didn’t have to come back and have to face all the things his son had done. He didn’t have to come back and learn that Lotor died the same way his wife did.”

Lance hummed thoughtfully, unsure of what to say to all that. “Wait,” he realized. “So that means… Who’s ruling Daibazaal now?”

“King Alfor,” Keith answered, looking relieved to finally have some good news.

“Oh!” Lance blinked. “Well, that’s gonna be great! Was kinda hoping it’d be Allura somehow though,” he admitted.

“Yeah, me too,” Keith smiled back. “But Allura’s happy.”

“Oh, wait, what about all the prisoners?” Lance asked, more memories and questions coming back to him. “Shiro and Hunk and Coran – they saved all the prisoners, right?”

“Yeah,” Keith answered. He went tight-lipped as if chewing on how to say something. “Apparently it was really crazy on their end. Hunk keeps saying–”

Just then, Kosmo barked from somewhere not too far off, echoing off walls. Lance was sure he was about sixty ticks away from being bombarded by everyone he knew. “Everyone’s about to swarm me, huh?” Lance asked with a small laugh.

“Yeah,” Keith said back, pulling Lance’s hand into his own. “There was one more thing I wanted to tell you,” Keith thought out loud, “but I’m debating on whether or not I should tell you, or let you see it for yourself.”

“What?” Lance laughed nervously. “What kind of cryptic bullshit answer is that?”

Keith hummed in response and stood up, pulling Lance to his feet after him as Kosmo ran barking into the room. “I just decided to let you see it for yourself,” Keith decided as their friends trickled into the room. “Stop being a baby, you’re going to love it. I promise.”

Lance grumbled nonsense he didn’t even mean in response as Princess Krolia walked toward them. Lance prepared to greet her, to officially meet her for the first time, but rather than stop before him, she merely sent him a small smile on her way to Keith, both of them trying to hide smiles like they had something to hide.

So did everyone else, Lance was noticing.

Hunk wouldn’t stop smiling at him like a proud mother, and even Pidge looked like she was going to burst under the weight of whatever it was they weren’t telling him. Frustrated and confused, Lance looked back to Keith who looked right back, gesturing with a nod to look back toward the doors. Exasperated, Lance followed his gaze… and started to become convinced that he was still dreaming in the pod.

A woman, followed by four others who looked just like her, who looked just like _him_ were walking toward him and–

He could hear Hunk cooing from his right, but it barely registered in Lance’s brain at all. _Nothing_ did aside from the people walking toward him – the people meeting him halfway as his own legs carried him forward before he’d even registered that he should move. They were people with skin and hair like _his_ , and some of them with _eyes_ like his and smiles like his. One of them, a gawky teenage boy looked so much like him it was like looking at a picture of himself when he was younger. And standing behind him was–

“ _Mom?_ ” he croaked. He had to be hallucinating – he was still in the pod, healing and trying to wake up because it _couldn’t_ really be… He couldn’t be looking at….

“Lance,” the woman whispered back, looking on the verge of tears. She was thinner and a little paler, and her hair had gone grey, but she still looked like he remembered.  She had the same wide eyes and the same nose and that very same smile as she looked at him. “Baby.”

“ _Mom_ ,” Lance repeated, air punched right from his gut as he rushed forward, meeting her in the middle in a fierce, tight, unending embrace that expanded as other hands and arms and bodies joined in. Through teary eyes he could see the faces of his sisters, Raquel and Veronica… his brothers Marco and Luis. He choked out a sob, realizing that Luis looked just like him – just like a carbon copy. All this time, they hadn’t been dead, they’d been stuck down in the dungeons, but they had _survived_. “Wait, where’s – where’s Dad and–”

He hated to say that deep down, he already knew the answer to that. It was reiterated by the looks on his family’s faces as one of his brothers stepped forward. “Dad and the others didn’t make it.”

Lance blinked back. For seven years now, he’d already thought that his dad, Angelica, Sophia, and Lucas were dead. Somehow, it hurt worse to find it out all over again a second time. Still, he thought as Raquel wiped away his tears, he had his family again. Even if it was less than what he’d started with, it was more than what he thought he’d ever have again.

“I’m just glad to have any of you back,” Lance said, trying to fit his arms around as many of them as he could. “I thought you were _all_ dead. I thought I had lost all of you.”

“Where _were_ you that day?” Veronica demanded with a sniffle, skewing her glasses as she wiped at her eyes. “Where did you go?”

Lance blinked back at her, trying to work out how to tell her that when he’d decided to leave what had started as a protest outside the castle, it seemed like a chance he’d be crazy to pass up. That he slipped away at the quickest opportunity to go looking for Keith, and that’d he’d just assumed that everything would be the way he left it when he came back.

“I went looking for Keith,” he admitted through all the same guilt he’d felt for the last seven years. “I didn’t know… I thought I’d just come back with nothing, and we’d all go home. I didn’t know…” he sighed. “I should have been with you guys, though.”

He expected to feel the heavy gaze of his family on him, but instead he saw them all look just beyond him across the room to a steadily purpling Keith.

“I didn’t know that,” Keith said.

“You and Allura disappeared and no one was telling us anything,” Lance explained. “That’s what the whole protest was for, but I just… I thought I could see for _myself_ what happened if I… yeah.”

“It saved your life, Lance,” Veronica realized, eyes going wide. “If you had stayed with us, then you would have been killed or caught like us and if that happened… then you never would have become the Blue Bandit.”

“I guess we’ve got Prince Keith to thank for having the Blue Bandit at all,” Raquel spoke up with a grateful look over at Keith who only stared flustered right back until Krolia gave him a push forward.

Arms folded against his chest, Keith took hesitant steps forward, eyes anywhere in the room but on them. “Don’t say that,” he started. “I didn’t – I wasn’t even here to–”

“You all made me who I am today,” Lance interrupted, looking around at all of them, his family, his boyfriend, everyone in this room, because he’d always known why he became the Blue Bandit. He’d always known it was to get justice for everyone he’d lost. “I mean, I did it in the first place to avenge at least half of you,” he admitted with a soft laugh. “But I wouldn’t be here today without any of you.”

It was far more open and honest than he genuinely preferred being with people. It was emotional and cheesy, but he didn’t care. He thought he had lost more than half the people in this room. He had almost died just days before in a fight to the death with Lotor. He didn’t ever want these words going unsaid ever again.

“Gross,” Marco said, as if he hadn’t given Lance a speech just as personal and touching when he’d passed Lance his jacket all those years ago. But Lance didn’t miss the fresh tears he wiped away, or the way he leaned just a little closer to Lance as he said it.

“We all knew about the Blue Bandit,” Luis chimed in with Lance’s exact smirk. Lance took one look and felt himself tearing up all over again. “I was the first one who thought it was you.”

“Hey! I thought so, too!” Veronica argued, shooting Luis a look. “I mean, after a while, anyway. I didn’t want to get my hopes up, since it already hurt so much, but we kept hearing stories about this hero in Daibazaal who was fighting back, and eventually I just knew,” she explained, with a teary smile back at Lance. “I just knew that somehow it was you.”

“They never shut up about it,” Raquel said with a playful glare at all of them. “Had me and mom thinking we were going crazy when we started to really hope it was you, too.” She pulled Lance down into her arms with a sigh against his shoulder. “I’m glad they were right, though.”

From there, Luis latched on, then Veronica and Marco, and finally his mother. They gathered in, closing in tight and wrapping around him and squeezing like they had years of it to make up for, letting go only when Coran appeared, insisting that he needed to check Lance’s vitals.

As he sat with Coran against the steps to the pods, he started to feel overwhelmed, but in a good way. He felt like his heart was full and it kept getting fuller as he looked around the room at all his friends being reunited with their loved ones, too. He felt their happiness like it was his own.

He could see Pidge across the room with the family she had saved. Her parents and her brother who looked so much like her it was scary. He could see her grinning, mouth moving a mile a minute as she pointed around the room, talking with her hands in wild gestures.

Hunk stood near the doors with Shay and two women who had to be his moms, Lance realized, as he remembered how Hunk had described them over the years. Hunk had an arm casually slung around Shay’s shoulders as he spoke to them. Lance imagined he had to look just as proud about it as Hunk’s own mothers did.

King Alfor and Queen Lura made their way into the room followed closely by Shiro and Allura who had brought trays of food. Lance watched as everyone gathered in the middle of the room, talking and eating together. Coran finished with him, offering him a hand up, but Lance shook his head, told him to go get food without him.

He was happy and content, but overwhelmed and _exhausted_ , and he didn’t think he could move another muscle. His eyes had just started to slip closed when suddenly, someone dropped themselves down beside him, startling him back awake.

“So,” Raquel started, holding out a bowl of soup to him. He took it with both hands, smiling at her in thanks. “About all those years you used to sneak out in the middle of the night–”

Lance nearly dropped his spoon. “Wait, how did _you_ kn–?”

“Was that you sneaking out to go stick your dick in the prince?”

Lance choked. “ _Oh, my god, Raquel!_ ” he wheezed, coughing up his soup. Raquel only laughed and pat him roughly on the back when he kept coughing.

“That’s not an answer.”

“ _No!_ I – how do you even _know_ about that?!” Lance demanded, voice a squeaky mess.

“Oh, come on, you _weren’t_ sneaky. Luis isn’t an idiot – you shared a _room_. He’d hear you sneak out every once in a while, and he’d tell all of us, and we all held onto it for blackmail,” she explained with a shrug and a grin. “We were _so_ off base with who you could have been dating though. The Prince of Daibazaal,” she whistled. She leaned back on her hands and looked at him with eyes full of pride. “ _Wow_.”

“I know,” Lance smiled back, leaning back just the same. “Sometimes, I still can’t believe it, myself.”

Across the room, Lance could see his mother talking to Princess Krolia. They stood together, undoubtedly sharing horribly embarrassing stories with each other about their sons between bites of their food, while Keith was right there in the thick of it, his arm locked in Lance’s mother’s grip. But he didn’t seem to mind it, looking just as comfortable with her as she was with him.

“Mom really likes Prince Keith,” Raquel spoke up, gaze following Lance’s. “She kind of bonded with him over waiting for you to wake up. She treats him like he’s so fragile, like a puppy. She thinks he’s so adorable,” she laughed. “I keep trying to tell her your boyfriend could kick our asses in two ticks, but she won’t hear it.”

Lance scoffed in response, smiling as Keith finally felt his gaze on him and met it with his own, lips pulling up into a soft grin. Lance couldn’t help but smile uncontrollably back.

“We noticed mom’s ring, by the way.”

“Huh?” Lance jumped.

“ _Mom’s ring_ ,” Raquel repeated, slower, smugger. “On Prince Keith’s finger. Princess Krolia did, too. So, is there a wedding happening or…?”

Lance scoffed. “What, with all _this_ going on?”

Raquel sat up straight then, smiling excitedly at him. “Well, it’s not going on anymore, right? I mean, yeah, you’re gonna have a really busy next couple of days,” she rushed out as she thought about it. “They’re probably going to throw some kind of parade in your honor or something, and the King has been talking about giving you an official _title_ for saving Daibazaal and all that, and Princess Krolia has been dying to talk to you. But when all that’s done… you should ask him.”

“But–”

“Just _do it_ ,” Raquel interrupted in a playful groan. “I don’t know. Something tells me they’d probably throw you guys a pretty nice wedding around here.”

“Nah,” Lance grinned. “Got a better idea.”

*

Epilogue:

It was the middle of the night and Keith should have been tired, but he was too excited. He felt wide awake as he waited patiently on the castle’s balcony, leaning impatiently against the smallest shuttle he could find. He tapped his boot against the floor as he checked the time for the third time in just as many dobashes.

His patience was waning…

“I’m here, I’m here!” Lance shouted, a loud smack sounding as he burst through the balcony door and it hit the wall. He rushed across the balcony, stopping before Keith. He thrust out a hand to support him against the shuttle, hunched over, breathing hard. “I’m so sorry I’m late, my siblings all caught me,” he explained in huffs. “They say congratulations!”

Keith stared, trying and failing not to crack a smile. “Lance–”

“I didn’t tell them! I swear!” Lance promised. “Veronica must have found the map in our room. I know she’s been in there!” His brows furrowed. “They have an entire floor of the castle to themselves, but is that enough for them? No, they always have to bother us,” Lance griped, though Keith could see the smile tugging at his lips. There was no amount of theatrical pretending Lance could do to convince Keith that he didn’t love every _second_ of having his siblings back in his life, even the supposedly annoying ones.

Keith shook his head, laughing softly as he opened the shuttle door. “Are they at least going to keep this to themselves?”

“They said they will,” Lance drawled, stepping up behind Keith to help him inside. “But I’m sure mom knows, too.”

“Fuck, then _my_ mom is going to know,” Keith blinked, legs hanging outside the ship. “Which means Allura and Shiro will know… Everyone knows,” he realized.

“No, not necessarily,” Lance argued with a playful smile. He rested warm hands on Keith’s knees, looked lovingly up at him with an encouragingly grin. “They don’t know where we’re going,” he offered.

“ _We_ don’t know where we’re going,” Keith pointed out with a laugh, leaning further down towards him like he couldn’t help it, like his soul just wanted to be closer to Lance.

“Well, they don’t know… _how_ we’re going,” Lance tried again, with a wink. “Or how _fast_ we’re going,” he said, eyes landing on the advanced control panel on the dash. He gave the shuttle a quick once over and gaped. “How did you even _get_ one of these ships? This thing is for missions!”

“I’m a royal,” Keith smirked as Lance huffed and walked around to the other side of the shuttle, hoisting himself inside. Keith settled himself into the pilot’s seat correctly. “I can get my hands on just about anything.”

“Well, I’m a fucking knight now, and I can’t get my hands on _shit_.”

Keith snorted. “You just have to start getting creative. I’ll teach you,” he laughed with a wink that made Lance flush. Keith pretended not to notice. “So, where to first?”

“I don’t know,” Lance hummed, thinking a moment, then he gasped, smiling over at Keith with wide, excited eyes. “Actually, I’ve kind of always wanted to see Olkarion?”

Keith couldn’t help but grin back. “Okay,” he nodded, starting up the shuttle, tapping at the control panel as it all become _real_. They were really eloping together – running off into the night together just like Keith wanted to when they were young and dumb and _hopelessly stuck_ on each other and.

That was how they were going to do everything now – _together_.

“What?” Lance asked, and Keith realized he’d been staring.

Keith smiled, reaching out to gently grab Lance’s face. He pulled him close to slot their lips together, and Lance smiled into the kiss, deepening it and savoring it. Keith felt like all the love in his heart was melting him from the inside out. Lance leaned in for one last press, pulling away, before Keith could kiss back.

“I love you,” Lance whispered, looking at him like he was his world. Like no matter where they went, he’d always be in Keith’s orbit.

Keith sighed, eyes falling shut just so he could wonder to himself how much love a person could possibly _feel_ before it stopped even making sense. “I love you, too,” Keith murmured back. Face flushed, he peeled open his eyes, immediately rolling them at Lance’s smug smile. Clearing his throat, he turned back to the control panel, pulling up the map to plot their course. “Olkarion, here we come,” he announced with a grin.

Lance hummed back, reaching over for Keith’s hand and lacing their fingers together. Softly, he kissed the back of Keith’s hand, held it close. “Olkarion, here we come,” he echoed.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading this and I hope you enjoyed it! I worked really, really hard on this so thank you for reading all these WORDS! Please drop me a comment if you fancy~~~ Or feel free to come scream at me on [Tumblr!](https://ambitiousskychild.tumblr.com/)


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